How an 83-year-old inventor beat the high cost of 3D printing

Great work, and if the spools continue to be $50 I definitely would want one. However I don't think the spools are $50 because they cost $50 to make, they probably cost $1 to make. It's the razors/blades or printer/ink cartridge business model. I'm sure all the 3D printing companies are making fat profits off the spools of plastics, and this will push those prices down a bit.

Interesting ... I've been playing around with the idea of having a hopper (mounted above the 3D printer) that fed pellets to the print head and used the same heater to extrude the filament right as it was being joined to the work-piece.<p>The two stage process is convenient for existing printers, but wouldn't it be nicer if new printers took pellets as their raw material?

Based on the numbers for cost of pellets vs cost of filament, it seems reasonable for someone to simply integrate this and make a printer that takes pellets instead of filament.<p>The device shown doesn't look overly complicated, and I would guess/hope the "crucial core" parts cost even less than the competition's requirement since that was for the whole machine.

Contests are a great way to attract a lot of interest to neglected problems.

So if you can make it at home so cheaply, why can't it be mass produced in a factory even more cheaply? It doesn't seem like shipping pellets would be much less expensive than shipping filament.

I would like to see this technology built into existing 3d printers. I would also like to see 3d scanners built in. I envision a single device that will allow you to put in a model, have it scanned, then replicated using cheap plastic material. You could even used recycled plastic with a macro shredder.

The guys at makibox have been tinkering with this idea. I think it is on the back burner until they ship their printers. (per request of printer pre-orderers)<p><a href="http://makibox.com/details/product/ramen_kit" rel="nofollow">http://makibox.com/details/product/ramen_kit</a>

THis is awesome - the only modification which I think would make it better would be to have the filament loop back to a spool that is attached to and turned by the same motor that is pushing the material out.<p>In the video - he shows the filament being spooled across the room by a device with a separate power source. Make it a singular closed little process.

<i>This home-made filament dramatically improves the economics of 3D printing. For instance, producing 392 chess pieces in a particular color requires one kilogram (2.2 pounds) of plastic. Buy one spool of mass-produced filament, and that will cost you about $50. Buy a kilogram of pellets and make your own filament, and the cost goes down to $10. Buy 25 kilograms of pellets in bulk, and you can print the chess pieces for just $5.</i><p>-- Seems to meet the "10x better" criterion.<p>Nice work.

Seems to me this method is patented. How are they going to sell these kits?<p>Reference: <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plastics_extrusion" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plastics_extrusion</a>