‘Filabot’ grinds up and melts old materials to make the system self-sufficient

Filabot / Tyler McNaney

The Filabot can recycle plastic items to make raw material for 3D printing.

Tomorrow’s homeowners may print out everything from utensils to furniture with 3D printers — and they may not even need to buy raw materials. Instead, they could simply recycle milk jugs, shampoo bottles and plastic packaging into plastic filaments usable by the 3D printers.

Such a vision comes from a crowd-funded Kickstarter project aimed at making plastic recycling affordable for anyone with a computer and 3D printer. The shoebox-size device, called “Filabot,” grinds and melts the old plastic items to make 3D printing self-sufficient — another step toward a world where people can order or create any item and print it on demand.

The Filabot prototype has so far proved capable of chewing up plastic pieces as big as 4 inches. Eventually, users will only have to feed their old plastic bottles into the machine and watch it go to work, according to the project’s Kickstarter FAQ.

Plastic household items tested in Filabot include soda bottles, milk jugs, water pipes, buckets, DVDs and sunglasses. The device might even someday melt down crayons.

The ground-down plastic gets fed into a hopper and ends up in a barrel where a heating coil melts the plastic at different temperatures. Molten plastic then gets pushed out through interchangeable nozzles and passed through sizing rollers to create plastic filaments ranging from 3 millimeters to 1.75 millimeters in diameter.

Once complete, the filaments end up stored on a spool ready for printing.

3D printers have become favorites of DIY tinkerers, but could eventually allow any casual consumer to make items appear as easily as the replicator technology in “Star Trek.” Researchers have already begun printing out robots and trying to create spare space station parts.

The Filabot project already has more than double its requested Kickstarter funding, with a total of $20,815 from 116 individuals. But people can still contribute to get prizes such as a full Filabot kit for $350, or an assembled Filabot for $490 that comes ready out of the box.

via MSN

Working closely with Autodesk, and 3D Systems, WB Engineering provides the best solutions for your design challenges, with an offering which includes everything from Autodesk training, to design process automation, ERP integration, and product development, to 3D Printing. Located in Miami, focused on the manufacturing and industrial markets, we are an engineering services company, combining talented people and business processes to provide Digital and Rapid Prototyping solutions (products and services). All of our efforts are focused on helping companies compress time to market, and decreasing design cost to add to our customers bottom line. Our approach to Digital Prototyping and Rapid Prototyping is scalable and cost effective, which can help your organization boost design efficiency while delivering more innovative design ideas.