Italy-based Ewe Industries has developed a personal filament extruder.
We’ve checked out several similar devices, but none have the incredible industrial design as the Ewe Filament Extruder. At first glance, this machine appears to be a peculiar coffee machine you might find in your twenty-first century kitchen. But no, it’s actually a 3D printer filament maker.
Like other such devices, the Ewe accepts plastic pellets or ground up shards in its 500g hopper at the top. A control panel allows precise settings for temperature and flow rates, which you can adjust to match the plastic type and desired filament specifications. An integrated spool accepts the extruded filament.
We’re quite happy to see the integrated spooler, since most other filament extruders somehow don’t see this as a necessary feature – and end up producing spaghetti-like blobs of filament.
The Ewe Extruder is available in several combinations:
- A kit that contains the essential mechanicals, but not the fancy exterior case for €330 (USD$410)
- An assembled version without the case for €490 (USD$615)
- A kit with all parts required to add the case for €170 (USD$212)
- A “Deluxe” version that is both assembled, including case, for €690 (USD$865)
It appears that you can acquire a Deluxe extruder for as low as €500 (USD$625) if you’re willing to put the whole thing together yourself, which likely isn’t difficult, given the complexity of filament extruders.
We have one concern, and that is the quality of the resulting filament. Many have tried and few have succeeded in producing quality filament with desktop devices. We’ve covered this topic previously, but the bottom line is that quality filament from industry today requires incredibly precise cooling, usually provided by massive water tanks at just the right temperature. Manufacturers often use precision laser measurement devices, such as the unit above at ColorFabb, to ensure the filament is accurately produced.
These features simply cannot be included in a desktop device, unless someone invents a way to precisely refrigerate hot filament emerging from an extruder and include laser scanning components.
Nevertheless, the Ewe Filament Extruder is an incredibly beautiful machine.
Via Ewe Industries
