Recycle rubbish into usable stock for a hacker space.
More and more hacker spaces are being created, these give people access to tools and equipment so that they can work on projects and inventions, many hacker spaces also run 'hacker days' where prizes are given for the best solution to a problem. A common and often rather hindering expense for all makers is materials costs, a lot of people would have their reprap running 24/7 if only they could afford the filament...
Thanks to recent advances in opensource hardware and a sucsesful kick-starter campaign a series of products are arriving on the open source scene which make it relatively simple to recycle commonly found plastics into good quality printing ribbon - if you want to find a special way of supporting the maker movement then you could do worse than considering buying or making one of these devices and organizing a collection of suitable plastic to recycle. Of course if you have a reprap of your own then you're bound to want a recycling machine to go with it, the cost saving will pay for it in no time - if you don't then you might consider this as a good step towards one, i'm sure if you were to make a good supply of quality filament and offered to trade the raw ingredient for printed reprap parts at a ratio which made it worth the printers while then i'm sure you could find no end of people willing to take you up on that.
The process works in two stages, first the plastic in the form of milk bottles, plastic bags or whatever is ground into small chunks which are then extruded via a nosell into useful ribbon.
I will look further into this idea and maybe try it, i'm building a reprap so i will want one of these, better keep an eye on how the proeject matures.
Thanks to recent advances in opensource hardware and a sucsesful kick-starter campaign a series of products are arriving on the open source scene which make it relatively simple to recycle commonly found plastics into good quality printing ribbon - if you want to find a special way of supporting the maker movement then you could do worse than considering buying or making one of these devices and organizing a collection of suitable plastic to recycle. Of course if you have a reprap of your own then you're bound to want a recycling machine to go with it, the cost saving will pay for it in no time - if you don't then you might consider this as a good step towards one, i'm sure if you were to make a good supply of quality filament and offered to trade the raw ingredient for printed reprap parts at a ratio which made it worth the printers while then i'm sure you could find no end of people willing to take you up on that.
The process works in two stages, first the plastic in the form of milk bottles, plastic bags or whatever is ground into small chunks which are then extruded via a nosell into useful ribbon.
I will look further into this idea and maybe try it, i'm building a reprap so i will want one of these, better keep an eye on how the proeject matures.