This was my worst one! It looked so beautiful though! 
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Sorry if this is a stupid question but Iāve only seen 3D printing for about 5 minutes just once in our lab.
Can you melt that down and reuse it in the printer or is it just game over for that material?
From aboveā¦
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As @chadmart1076 said!
Something something chemical composition of melted plastics. There are ways to do it but the biggest trick with any production machines out there is to make it as uniform as possible. The more uniform your filament the better prints work.
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Missed that! Thanks!
Yeahā¦ I imagine you might sacrifice a little quality putting the yoke back into the shell as it were.
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I couldnāt have said it better!
I find my filament usually lasts me a pretty long time anyways. That mistake was probably like 25 cents worth of plastic out of a 25-30 dollar spool
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Am I the only one that thinks these 3D printed rats nests look pretty cool? Iām sitting here thinking they would make some cool modern art if you took a few colors and entangled them, then encased into a solid block of clear casting resin. I dont know why I have this idea, it just struck me. LOL!
I use an SLA 3D printer (laser/photopolymer resin) and the failures donāt look at neat as theseā¦ they look pretty much like the string of explicatives that get spewed upon failure discovery.
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Is that all it is? Didnāt know about costs. So, yeahā¦ Iād say itād almost never be worth it even if you could figure out how to reuse it.
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Itās not so much the air prints that are worth (maybe) recycling into new filament but spoiled or discarded prints. You get 15 hours into a 16 hour job and the spool runs out. Or you run test after test tweaking things to get something right. Soon youāve got a pile of bits of things youāve made that seems a shame to toss in the trash. The recycling machines will grind it up and remelt and extrude.
But at the end of the day unless maybe youāre some big consumer, Iāve never felt the urge to do that. It doesnāt seem worth the time to then have to fiddle with some other filament peculiarities.
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String of dollars. Man resin is expensiveā¦
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Yes it is. The resins I use vary from $125-$200 per liter but thankfully most of the stuff I print is small and detailed, otherwise I just sculpt larger projects by hand, itās much faster.
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This guy has a full recycling āportfolioā with plans and instructions if youāre interested: https://preciousplastic.com/en/machines/
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I have a filastruder, which is capable of doing just that. However, in general not worth it (and would be hard with a rats nest. I have only used mine to make novel filaments (e.g. ones that work like bones, etc) rather than recycling. Just too cheap to buy PLA filament, and the exotic ones donāt shred or re-extrude well. But that being said making your own, if you arenāt picky is super cheap. I have a 2kg bag of PLA pellets which were under $5
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Thatās pretty much how my co-worker in the lab said itā¦ āYeahā¦ You can start a job, go away for hours, maybe a day, maybe 2, only to come back and find something failed at some point and, well, thatās it. Youāre starting the whole thing over now.ā
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When I brought the 3D printing pen in to the library for kids to play with, some of them tried to make things, but most of them just contributed to the big mass of multicolored plastic threads. Which I think is still on display. (That experience, btw, is why I have good expectations for at least some kids and a GF. I just told them all at the beginning of the session that the tip was hot enough to melt plastic, and none of them touched it, tried to burn one another, etc.)
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So this actually seems like a 3d printer addon that is screaming to be soldā¦ have a camera monitor the print, if it detects objects outside the expected print area, or identifies a print gone bad, it automatically stops the print.
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The first and only time Big Bird made fun of anyone.
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The problem is the correlation of what governs a bad print. You will have to combine machine vision with the ability to match that machine vision with the image of what is being built, determine a match, and compensate for the motion of the printer. I think it could be done, but I think that the time and effort required may be more than anyone wants to invest.
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And since 100% of my prints for the last 2 weeks on multiple printers have been black prints, 50% on a black bedded printer, that would make machine vision extraordinarily hard!
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