{"id":295,"date":"2015-01-21T14:26:03","date_gmt":"2015-01-21T14:26:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/fusion360.wpengine.com\/welcome-to-redetec-easy-recycling-for-3d-printing\/"},"modified":"2020-11-19T16:38:29","modified_gmt":"2020-11-20T00:38:29","slug":"welcome-to-redetec-easy-recycling-for-3d-printing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.autodesk.com\/products\/fusion-360\/blog\/welcome-to-redetec-easy-recycling-for-3d-printing\/","title":{"rendered":"Welcome to ReDeTec: Easy Recycling for 3D Printing"},"content":{"rendered":"

Hey everyone! I\u2019m Dennon Oosterman, co-founder of ReDeTec Inc and co-inventor of ProtoCycler, the first fully integrated and automated filament recycler for 3D printers. In this post, I\u2019m going to tell you how we at ReDeTec got where we are today.<\/p>\n

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The Wonder and Waste of 3D Printing<\/strong><\/p>\n

I first started 3D printing more than three years ago when I was taking an engineering physics course at the University of British Columbia. Though I\u2019d already become accustomed to making pretty much whatever I wanted using the combination of a waterjet, mill, and lathe, 3D printing completely blew me away.<\/p>\n

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With 3D printing, I didn\u2019t have to spend a full day in the student machine shop just to make a part that would (of course) end up needing revision. I didn\u2019t have to go through a 40-hour training course to use it. I didn\u2019t even have to worry about designing my parts so they were easy to make. All I needed to do was click print \u2014 it was beautiful!<\/p>\n

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Fast-forward a few months and it quickly became apparent to me that 3D printing still has a few serious drawbacks. While it nearly eliminates the time and skill required to create pretty much anything, it\u2019s also very expensive and wasteful. It costs $30, minimum, for a 1kg spool of filament, and that can easily rise to $60 or even $90 depending on supplier and quality. And 3D printing generally incurs waste with every print, due to rafting and support material; this gets much worse when you\u2019re iterating through designs, or can\u2019t always get perfect prints. The result was that, a few months into 3D printing, I\u2019d saved myself a lot of time, but had literally filled garbage bins with $50\/kg plastic. That\u2019s some expensive garbage!<\/p>\n

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\"2.jpg\"<\/p>\n

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Finding a Way to Recycle 3D Printing Plastic<\/strong><\/p>\n

The thing is, the plastic itself doesn\u2019t actually cost that much. Buying plastic in its raw or natural form is closer to $5 per kilo than $50. And 3D printing doesn\u2019t need to be wasteful \u2013 the plastic you throw away is no different than the plastic you use to feed the printer. But desktop 3D printers almost exclusively need their plastic to be in expensive filament form (think weed-whacker line, or very thick fishing line), not in affordable pellet form or free garbage form. Which raises the question: what if there were a way to convert any form of plastic \u2014 pellets, rafting, support, failed prints, etc. \u2014 into filament?<\/p>\n

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The following fall, a lot more people started asking that same question when an award of $40,000 and a complete fabrication shop was offered to the first person to turn raw pellets into filament. An inventor named Hugh Lyman ended up winning the contest<\/a>, but did not plan on commercializing his invention.<\/p>\n

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We decided to give it a shot ourselves, and embarked on the long journey of trying to create a filament recycling system. We ended up getting a pretty awesome proof of concept ready, but it was far closer to a cobbled-together creation than a shelf-ready finished product. We needed help to make our idea a reality, and a beautiful one at that.<\/p>\n

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Finding the Right Tools to Make Better Products<\/strong><\/p>\n

Enter Autodesk. Thanks to a partnership with our local startup accelerator, we were able to get started with a suite of Autodesk software: Inventor, A360, PLM360, and perhaps most importantly Fusion 360. As an Autodesk Cleantech partner<\/a>, all of a sudden we were armed with the proper tools to transform our proof of concept into a consumer-ready prototype.<\/p>\n

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We used Inventor for the more serious mechanical design work and Fusion 360 to plan the layout and integrate each part of the unit into one beautiful, functional package. PLM360 and A360 allowed us to collaborate on all of this in real time so we could all contribute and give feedback on each area of the project. The results sort of speak for themselves in terms of how useful this was: it took only six months to take our product from being a barely-working proof of concept to a beautifully-enclosed final prototype. Without Autodesk, I\u2019m not sure we would have been able to do it at all!<\/p>\n

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We\u2019re now crowdfunding ProtoCycler on Indiegogo, and the campaign is already successful! (Shameless sales pitch: Go check it out.<\/a>) None of this would have been possible without Inventor, PLM 360, A360, and Fusion 360. Together, they allowed us to accelerate our development at a rate we didn\u2019t think possible, collaborate in a way that actually made sense, and track all of our developments in a central, accessible manner. It was almost as if we hired a full design team, but without having to move to a bigger office.<\/p>\n

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\"4.jpg\"<\/p>\n

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We\u2019re excited that the first fully integrated, fully automated recycling system for 3D printers will now become a reality \u2014 saving plastic from the landfill and money from being needlessly spent \u2014 and we can\u2019t to see what people will do with it!<\/p>\n

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 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Check out the exciting IndieGoGo crowdfunded campaign for the first fully integrated and automated filament recycler for 3D printers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":123,"featured_media":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"coauthors":[],"class_list":["post-295","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fusion","dhig-theme--light"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nWelcome to ReDeTec: Easy Recycling for 3D Printing | Fusion 360 Blog<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Check out the exciting IndieGoGo crowdfunded campaign for the first fully integrated and automated filament recycler for 3D printers.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" 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