22 May Introducing domestic filament extruders: the main advantages

Let’s discover the main advantages of domestic filament extruders: customized filament, respect for the environment and convenience.

What filament extruders are

Filament extruders are useful machines that – as the name suggests – allow to extrude the filament used by 3D printers, starting from some plastic material.

There are filament extruders of various kinds. However, to simplify, we can distinguish between two main types of extruders: on the one hand the industrial ones, which we find in sheds and factories, used for the production of spools for large-scale distribution, and on the other, domestic extruders, category where Felfil Evo belongs.

These are products made to be used at home, in research laboratories or in small industrial companies, of a much smaller size than industrial extruders; Felfil Evo, for example, can be turned on on a table or a desk.

In this article we will examine all the advantages of using a domestic filament extruder compared to the purchase of filament coils.

Customization

First, an extruder allows you to create the filament with the material of your choice: can’t you find the material you want on the market, or is it too expensive?

Do you want to test a new polymer or innovative filaments?

With Felfil Evo this is possible: we, for example, made a filament with a pleasant scent of coffee, or with a percentage of carbon, which has given the material a particular shine and a certain robustness.

The main advantage, besides being able to experiment autonomously, lies in the limited quantity of material you need for the tests; with industrial extruders, in fact, the costs would probably be unsustainable due to the large amount of material required, while Felfil Evo requires much smaller quantities (less than 0,1 lb).

Environment

Since the main material required by FDM 3D printers is plastic, it is easy to see that this technology has a certain environmental impact

A domestic filament extruder makes 3D printing more sustainable: as every enthusiast knows, before reaching a satisfactory result for a model it is necessary to make several tests. With an extruder it is possible to recycle previous wrong prints, divided by material and shredded, and transform them into filament that can be used again.

Convenience

Finally, a further reason why you might consider buying a filament extruder is that, in the long run, you would save a considerable amount of money compared to buying the spools.

A desktop extruder, in fact, allows you to create the filament you need to print starting from previous wrong prints, crushed plastic scraps or plastic pellets, which have a lower costs than reels.

An example? A spool of PLA has a price ranging between €16 and €20, while a kg of PLA pellets costs half: in this case, by extruding the filament yourself you could save between 30 and 50%.