The Netherlands is back at it again!  This time, it is a company named Refil.  What Refil is currently doing is recycling old car dashboards and used plastic bottles into new 3D printer filament.  Currently they offer 2 types of filament, black ABS, and translucent PET.

The black ABS is made from 100% recycled car dashboards, door panels, and other ABS car parts.  The translucent PET, is made from 90% recycled plastic bottles.  What is really cool about the translucent material, is that the color is unique to whatever type of bottle that they happen to be recycling that day.  Which means it could be greenish, clearish, blueish, grayish.  Very cool.

This company makes this filament by grinding up the original material, melting it down, removing any impurities or contaminants, and finally extruding it in either 1.75mm or 2.85mm 3D printing filament.

Currently, the price to ship this filament to the US, it a bit steep, but we plan on getting our hands on some of this soon to give it a try.

Check out their website at http://re-filament.com

Hey Everyone,

We have been doing a lot of 3D printing over the past few months.  We have been printing for clients, for fun, and for experimentation purposes.  I figured I would share a few pictures of some of the good and the ugly prints we have encountered.

I am going to start with a beautiful failed print.  This is what we in the industry call, “making spaghetti”.  If the print comes loose from the build plate during a print, this is what you get.  This can occur due to a number of things like fingerprints on the buildplate, or in my case, improper part cooling of the part during printing.  What happened in this scenario was that I disabled the nozzle cooling fans during the print and the part warped a bit at the top causing the nozzle to hit the part and dislodge it from the build plate.  The printer has no idea that this happened and it keeps on going on it’s merry way and ruining your 25 hour print about 20 hours into it.  🙂

This next picture is one of the new experimental materials that we got in.  It is called “Thermoplastic Polyurethane”.  This is the same material that they make roller coaster wheels from.  How cool is that?

I decided to print a test robot using the Ultimaker Original.  This material needs to print at a pretty high temperature.  Somewhere between 240 and 260 C.

So, how do I think it turned out?  Poorly actually.  You can see that the the finish is a bit bubbly.  This is most likely due to me running the extruder too hot at 250C.  You will also notice that the antennas on the head of the robot melted pretty significantly.  This was due to the fact that I did not have the cooling fans running during the print similar to when printing ABS.

Overall a very interesting material.  I could see it practically used as a material for custom mouth guards or something like that.  This material also has an extremely high resistance to abrasion and is relatively flexible.

Now to wrap this up, here are a few pictures of the things that we designed and printed for the 2015 Pinball Olympics!  And, yes, that is a pinball flipper with a neodymium magnet in it.

So we love to try out new experimental 3D printable materials. We recently got in a roll of Carbon Fiber reinforced PLA from a start-up company called Proto-Pasta. More info can be found at the Proto-Pasta website.

We decided to print a few tests using this new material.  What did we print?  This was an easy question with an obvious answer.  The model of choice ended up being an “unnamed brand” one of our favorite style of building blocks from our childhood!

The images below were printed at 160 micron layer height at 225 degrees C.

The material printed quite well, just like any other PLA, but we did notice that the filament was fairly brittle while it was on the spool, so extra care is needed when loading it into the machine.  The bridging performance was really great as well.

As for the overall strength after printing, this is still to be determined.  The material is VERY rigid, but at the same time feels like it could take a bit of an impact without breaking.

Overall, this is a very interesting filament with a nice shiny dark gray appearance.  You can actually see the very small fibers.

We have yet to determine practical applications for this material, but over time will will perform a few more tests.  This could be a very good option for certain types of brackets and tools.