Ewe Filament Extruder – Makes Creating Your Own 3D Printer Filament a Piece of Cake

3D Printing isn’t cheap. Even with the prices of FDM 3D pritners dropping drastically in the past several months, it is the residual costs of having to continuously purchase spools of filament, that can price many people out of the market.  Spools of filament range anywhere from $20 up to $100+, depending on the manufacturer and material used.

A company from Italy hopes to make 3D printing a much more affordable process. Ewe Industries, has developed a very unique filament extruder, which not only creates filament from raw materials (PLA and ABS), but also spools it for you as it is manufactured. The machine accepts granulated PLA and ABS plastic, which can be purchased for pennies on the dollar, when compared to the spools of filament we are all used to having to fork our hard earned cash over for.

The product is now available for purchase on the Ewe Industries website starting at 330€. They offer 3 different options:

• Filament Extruder Starter Kit – 330€
• Filament Extruder Assembled Kit – 490€
• Filament Extruder Deluxe – 690€

The starter kit must be assembled upon shipment, while the assembled kit includes the basic extruder, capable of doing just about everything except spooling the filament. The Deluxe kit includes an attractive looking outer covering, an LCD screen, and Joystick. It also includes the spool and spooling mechanism in order to spool your filament as it comes out of the extruder.

LCD screen

The Ewe Filament Extruders allows you to mix and match colors of plastic to get just the perfect look you are going for. For example, you can feed it with red and blue PLA in order to make purple filament. The color possibilities are endless, as it is up to you to mix and match and find that perfect combination.

“You can choose your color and combine it with others to obtain the preferred shade,” explains Ewe Industries. “You can also add chargest to the basic color for different finishes (carbon, wood, etc.).”

Users of the extruder have the option of running it in either automatic or advanced mode, to create just the right filament for their needs. The temperature and time of the extrusion may be adjusted, or you can allow the machine to use its computer to synchronize the speed of extrusion to that of the spooling.

The company hopes that this will help individuals and businesses reduce the residual costs that are involved in 3D printing, by allowing them to purchase the raw materials used in the process directly, before using this machine to create their own filament.. What do you think? Is this a device that you would be interested in purchasing? Discuss in the Ewe Filament Extruder forum thread on 3DPB.com

Check out the video of the Ewe Filament Extruder below: