Failed prints, prototypes, or just purging
poop from multi-color prints. Yes, this is all waste from 3D printing. Instead of throwing
this plastic away and paying for new filament, wouldn't it be great to recycle this waste
and make new filament from it? I recently

bought a DIY filament extruder kit costing only
around 600 bucks to find out how it compares to professional solutions that I used in the
past that cost at least 10 times as much! Let's find out more! Guten Tag everybody,
I'm Stefan and welcome to CNC Kitchen.

This video is sponsored by KiwiCo. Get 50%
off your first month by using the link below! Everyone who has a 3D printer will collect
significant amounts of waste over time, and at least for me, it always feels
wasteful to throw it into the trash,

and I think I'm not the only one here. Over
the years, I already showed several attempts of how to recycle this waste into new filaments.
Yet so far, my machines have either been quite hard to set up to get them working reliably
or were so expensive that only a business

can really afford them. But this time it
might be different! A couple of months ago, I stumbled over a German company called
Artme that makes a DIY filament extruder kit that looked really promising. Now back
to extruders. One big downside of other DIY

solutions is that they often use a big wood drill
or auger as a feeding screw for the material, which kind of works but is far from optimal.
Artme uses a custom-machined feeding screw which doesn't only look really pretty but should also
significantly help to feed and extrude, especially

shredded 3D prints. And the best thing is the
Artme3D Mk2 is, besides some small limitations, basically Open Source with the intention of
making the machine widely and easily available. You could even build one from scratch and just
buy essential custom components, like the screws.

I ordered a complete kit, and after it had been
sitting in my studio for a while, finally found the time to build it and test it out. And just to
make it clear, I’m not affiliated with Artme and

purchased the machine with my own money. If you
appreciate that, please consider leaving a like. Let’s look at the basics. Very simply spoken,
such a plastic extruder is a screw, that’s driven by a high-torque motor that runs inside a heated
barrel. The plastic is fed from one end, then gets

molten and mixed, and leaves the barrel through
a nozzle on the other end, producing filament. The Artme3D MK2 is an extruder kit which means
that you get the individual components but have to assemble and wire everything yourself.
It also doesn’t come with the plastic parts,

so you have to print these yourself, and
this is what I did at first. I separated the parts into three categories. The first
one was general parts that didn’t have any significant thermal loading and that I printed
from PLA in three fully loaded print jobs on

my Bambu Lab X1 Carbon. In separate jobs,
I printed the aesthetic housing parts facing down on the textured PEI sheet of my A1 Mini
to get a really nice surface finish. The last set of parts were the ones that get a bit warmer
and that I printed from black PETG. All in all,

It took me around 50 hours to print all of
the pieces using 1.5 spools of filament. Once I was finished with the printing process,
I could finally start assembling the extruder. David, who is the designer of the Artme3D,
seriously includes everything in the kit,

starting from well-sorted screws to tools,
and even includes things like superglue and aluminum foil that we'll need in a bit.
The only thing that's missing due to legal reasons is the 24V power supply, which is
another 20 bucks on Amazon. The manual is

available in many different languages, some
probably machine-translated from German. I checked the German and English ones which
are super detailed, very easy to follow, and remind me a lot of the manual from a Prusa
printer kit, only without the gummy bears.

The assembly process is broken down
into several sections starting with the extruder. Here I fixed the barrel to the
pre-cut aluminum extrusion and connected the big and geared-down stepper motor to the
extruder screw. The ingenious thing here

is that the coupler already includes a stir bar
that should later help to evenly feed the very sharp and chunky shredded plastic that otherwise
interlocks and even stops feeding. After that, the hopper is added, and the heating unit, which
looks like a huge 3D printer heating block,

gets fixed to the extruder barrel. The
whole assembly gets then screwed to a base. Most of the electronics that are used sit
in the back and are simply repurposed from a 3D printer. The wires all
come pre-crimped with ferrules,

and all the connections are explained idiot-proof in the manual. The extruder motor uses a separate driver module because it requires more power than regular 3D printer motors. The screen that sits on the side of the machine is also just a really old model I've already used 8

years ago on my first printer but it should be more than sufficient for what we need it for. Next, I assembled the filament winder, which will later spool our freshly extruded material. This is a really clever construction with an adjustable filament guide that automatically

reverses its direction once it reaches the stop in order to get a nice and equal distribution of the filament over the width of the spool. The spool itself is driven by a separate stepper motor that's connected via a belt that can slip so the filament is always wound with the perfect tension.

Every rotation of the spool, a mechanism actuates the filament guide so it advances a tiny bit. The next step was a bit messy. In order to stabilize temperatures and reduce the power usage of the machine, the whole extruder barrel gets insulated with some rock wool. I made sure

to wear gloves and a respirator, but the fibers still ended up almost everywhere. I wrapped the sheet of insulation around the barrel and then slit the cover over it. The following step was honestly one of the most satisfying ones and shows how much thought David

put into his DIY filament extruder. If you have seen any of my last videos on filament recycling, you know that any dirt or metal chips that are in the ground-up plastic will end up in the filament, and if they are too big, will clog the small nozzle. In order to reduce that risk,

The Artme3D uses a melt filter, which is
a wire mesh that has holes smaller than
the typical nozzle diameter of a 3D printer, so
anything bigger should be caught here. The mesh
is not just put flat in the nozzle, but David
developed a two-stage forming die to create a

3-dimensional filter structure for increased
surface area and rigidity. After this really
satisfying forming step, I put the filter into
the nozzle holder that seals against leaking with
some Teflon tape. Unfortunately, this limits
the maximum extrusion temperature to 260°C,

which should still be enough for most extrusion
and recycling projects. I then screwed a regular
3D printer nozzle that’s drilled to 1.7mm
into the holder through which the filament
will later extrude. The nozzle is slightly
undersized because the molten plastic will

swell up a little after it leaves the small
hole due to the pressures inside the extruder. After this step was finished, I built
and installed a very simple filament
feeder that pushes the newly extruded
filament to the winder. It has a small

tension arm to get enough pressure on
the material to pull it, but hopefully,
not so much that we squish the
still slightly soft material. The last essential component of the machine
is the sensor unit. This is not a filament

diameter sensor but only a filament position
sensor. The Artme3D will rely on gravity to
basically stretch our extruded filament to the
right diameter after it leaves the nozzle. To
keep the force consistent, it should always
droop down a similar amount. The Artme uses

an optical sensor for that, through which
a translucent plastic piece with increasing
thickness is rotated, which acts like a
simple angle sensor. A piece of wire is
attached to the rotating part through
which we'll later guide our filament.

And after a bit of final wiring and cleaning up,
the Artme3D MK2 is finally finished. This honestly
was a really nice and well-documented build
taking me a good day to finish. But let's now
see if it also works and produces filament
in the quality we need for 3D printing!

The extruder is easily capable of making filament
from pellets, yet we want to use it to recycle old
and failed prints. So I recently printed a bunch
of soldering iron tips cases that we sold for a
Black Friday special, yet I ended up with a bit
of scrap. Some of the prints failed due to bad

bed adhesion, clogged nozzles or filament that
ran out. I think these scraps are the perfect
opportunity to recycle into new filament and, of
course, print new cases from. These, of course,
don't directly feed in the extruder, so the first
thing we need to do is grind them up to have small

shreddings. In the past, I tried a blender,
a modified paper shredder, and even built a
hand-cranked shredding machine, which all, to some
degree, work, yet the most reliable thing is still

a real electric shredder that I, fortunately, have
as well. So I fed the failed cases, purge blocks,
and printer poop into the machine and let it chew
through the plastic. The ground-up material was
already mostly fine enough, yet I still sieved it
and put the parts that were too big back into the

shredder. At first, I kept the blue and gray
shreddings separate. I had to learn more than once that dry material is essential to make
good filament, so I took all of the material, put it on a tray, and placed it into my drying
oven for three hours at 60°C. Since I was a bit

lazy, I mixed the two separate colors together,
hoping that the resulting color would still turn out nice. To get the last bit of moisture out
of the material, I poured everything into my vacuum chamber with a bit of desiccant
and evacuated the still-warm particles.

The next day, I was finally able to try
out how well the Artme3D MK2 handled my shredded 3D printing waste. So I turned
the machine on and preheated it to the recommended starting temperature of
180°C. While it heated up I installed

an empty spool of filament on the holder
and adjusted the endstops in a way that the filament guide reached both sides of
the roll. Then I added some scoops of the shreddings into the hopper. Once everything
was hot, I started the extrusion process and

was super excited once the first bit of our
recycled filament came out of the nozzle. I think you were able to hear my enthusiasm if
things start working that I built and where I see the opportunity to learn something new! We
have a 3-year-old daughter, and I really hope

that she, at some point, finds the same level of
excitement in doing things with her own hands, learning something new, and just building
stuff. This is one of the reasons why we have been subscribers of KiwiCo ever since she was not
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So invest in something useful, excite your kids in what you’re excited about as well, and click the link in the description or use code CNC to get 50% off your first month of KiwiCo! So I let a bit of material extrude out for a little bit until the flow equalized and started

the spooling process. To do that, I first cut off the freshly extruded filament right after the nozzle and guided the strand by hand through the sensor arm and toward the feeder until it was pulled in. Then I adjusted the feeder speed so that the sensor arm stayed in more or less the

vertical orientation. Once this seemed to be the case, I started the auto-pulling process. In this mode, the extruder will go faster if the filament hangs down more and go slower if it’s getting too far up. To start the winding process, I once again cut off the filament where it leaves the guide and

threaded the end through a hole at the spool, and bent it over, so it doesn’t get pulled out. I used the first couple of meters to make sure that the filament diameter was close to 1.75 mm. Dialing

the diameter in is something that needs a bit of experience and skill. The parameters won’t be universally usable and will depend on the filament type and even color, yet Artme provides some good values to start with. So if the diameter, for example, is too big, you can increase

the extrusion temperature; if it’s too thin, you can reduce it. Yet also, the position and strength of the cooling fan, position of the sensor and also rpm of the extruder screw can change the result. I regularly measured the diameter of the filament with calipers, which is something that

isn’t optimal, and once I was happy just let it run. I filled up the rest of the hopper with the shredded material and could nicely see over the course of 3 hours how the spool slowly filled up

with a really nice-looking filament. The extruder
ran in a different room, and I was always wearing a respirator when checking because extruding
so much material is a bit smelly and probably also a bit of the unhealthy kind. But, you do
you. The winding wasn’t perfect, but I mean, 

what can you expect from a first-try and an
inexpensive DIY solution? During the process, I could really see how the stir bar feature helped
to constantly mix the shredded material so that it was nicely and, more importantly, evenly fed. I
hooked up a power meter since people always ask 

how much energy is used, and I was surprised
that it only drew, on average, around 60W, which is far less than a 3D printer and just what
an incandescent light bulb needs. I regularly 

checked the diameter of the extruded filament
which fluctuated +- 1/10 of a mm around our 1.75 mm target. This means, at least, this batch is not
as precise as most commercial filament, but hey, 

this is a $600 machine and 100% recycled material!
And in the end, the proof is in the eating of the pudding or rather in the printing of the recycled
filament. So once most of our shredded 3D prints 

were eaten up by the extruder, I stopped the
process, cut the filament, and removed a really beautifully looking roll of filament without
any noticeable bumps or other inconsistencies. So as I said in the beginning, this material once
was the trash and leftover from my soldering tip 

case production, so what better way to use it
than to print more cases with it? I loaded it
onto my Bambu Lab A1 Mini and started printing
without any special settings. And oh boy, was I
not disappointed by the results! The cases
looked really pretty. Mixing up the two colors

only led to a bit of a darker blue color, but
the prints looked really pretty. The only way
I was really able to tell them apart from new
filament was the fact that there sometimes
were a bit of color streaks in the material,
where more of one or the other color was fed.

I also printed this owl as well as a Mini
Stefan, which both turned out beautiful,
and I honestly wasn’t even able to see the
variances in filament diameter on the print. During the time I’ve had the Artme3D so far,
I extruded two more batches of recycled PLA.

One was some leftover filament poop
shreddings I had from my last video,
which came out really beautiful. Due to
the compact design of the Artme extruder,
there isn’t a lot of material mixing happening
in the barrel, which results in these really

unique color gradients in the material, and
particularly on the prints! The third batch was
from some 3-year-old shredded material I still
found in my basement, but that also extruded
really well. This had a significant portion of
black so it extruded in this dark grey with a bit

of glitter. Filament diameter variation was again
around +-0.1 mm but the prints didn’t show any of
that and were honestly really nice! So besides
these Mini Stefans, I printed more cases from
my own recycled filament, which you can find as a
limited edition in our shop at CNCKitchen.STORE.

At the end of the last batch that I did, I noticed
that the extrusion rate significantly dropped. During my first batch, the feeder was set to
around 30 revolutions per minute, but during the last hour of extrusion of the last batch, the
feeding speed dropped down all the way to around

16 RPM. This could, of course, be simply due to
the different material that I ran, but I already suspected the melt filter caught some stuff and
slowly clogged. So I first purged everything that still was in the barrel with some plain PLA
pellets and then unscrewed the nozzle holder with

the melt filter. At first sight, it didn’t look
too bad, but upon further inspection, I was able to see some bigger metal pieces and also a bunch
of glitter that accumulated. I had not a single clog printing any of my three recycled batches,
so the filter clearly does its job but it seems

to require a bit of attention from time to time to
get the machine running smoothly and efficiently. In summary, I’m super happy with the Artme3D MK2
DIY filament extruder. You really notice that this is not the first generation of this machine,
and many problems have already been ironed

out. You clearly see David's German engineering
background. He did a tremendous job designing the machine and putting a kit together that’s
super simple to assemble. Running the machine will require a bit of tinkering, and you can’t
expect tightly toleranced filament like from

machines that cost orders of magnitude more and
uses virgin materials, but as my tests showed, the material that I made seems to be perfectly
usable for many applications. Yet the machine is not perfect. The wire sensor arm is annoying,
and sometimes the filament gets stuck to it and

then bounces around. Measuring the diameter
is not super easy, and of course, it would be great to have some kind of an active feedback
system. But the amazing thing is that the design, electronics and firmware are all freely available
and mostly open source, so if you have a special

application or simply want to improve it, you can
do that and contribute to the project. I’m quite sure that this is the least expensive yet still
really well-working solution if you want to get into making your own filament or recycling
old prints. 650 € is still a lot of money, 

and this doesn’t include a shredding solution
yet. There also aren’t that many makers that will make this money back in saved filament. Yet,
just like consumer 3D printing, if you see this as a hobby and are happy if you can recycle your
old prints, even though it doesn’t save you money, 

this is probably the best bang for your buck
filament maker that you can get at the moment. But please let me know your thoughts in
the comments about filament recycling and what you would like me to see doing with this
machine in the future. Do you see this as a 

feasible solution for hobbyists or maker spaces,
or would you rather just discard your old prints? Thanks for watching, everyone! I hope you
found this video interesting! If you want to support my work, consider becoming a Patron
or YouTube member. Also check out the other 

videos in my library! I hope to see you in
the next one! Auf wiedersehen and goodbye!

Recycling Failed 3D Prints with a DIY Filament Extruder: Artme3D

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