Feed Your 3-D Printer Recycled Plastic

摘要

If you want to 3-D-print all of your ideas, you'll need to start with a hefty supply of plastic filament-the "ink" used by 3-D printers. Or you could get a ProtoCycler and make your own. In 2013, Dennon Oosterman and his former classmates Alex Kay and David Joyce grew tired of churning through expensive filament. So they built a machine that could recycle it back into usable form. The $700 ProtoCycler grinds scrap plastic-such as empty bottles and rejected 3-D-printed models-into digestible pieces, melts it down, extrudes it, and winds it onto a spool. To ensure consistency, a computer-controlled diameter-feedback system uses two cameras to accurately measure the width of the filament.