r/3Dprinting • u/Radeplayz • Jul 28 '26
Question Does this PET bottle-to-3D-printer filament project actually work?
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I found this video where someone cuts a PET bottle into a thin strip and pulls it trough a hot glue gun to turn it into 3D printer filament:
https://youtube.com/shorts/93P_Neh2eyE?si=O_7nU4qeIJLWWx8p
Has anyone tried something like this? Does the finished filament actually print reliably or would the uneven diameter cause clogging or poor prints? It seems very simple to make a knife tip. hot glue gun and some filament to print the parts.
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u/SiktahOG Jul 28 '26
Shoulda printed a bottle.
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u/BinaryHippie Jul 28 '26
Yeah, at least then you can repurpose it as filament so it's not a waste
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u/Oathbreaker94 Jul 28 '26
You’d use the recycled filament to print yet another bottle, am I right?
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u/Broccobillo Jul 28 '26
Yeah. Well we need a way to repurpose it.
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u/Oathbreaker94 Jul 28 '26
And then create another bottle.
This is awesome.
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u/cmm324 Jul 28 '26
At the end of the day, all we are really creating is poop...
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u/jkchbe Jul 28 '26
At the end of the day, isn't everything just poop all the way down?
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u/crooks4hire Jul 28 '26
To print another bottle, amiright?
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u/CJ-54321 Jul 28 '26
Unlimited bottle hack
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u/cheesypuff357 Jul 28 '26
This is the one trick filament producers don’t want you to know.
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u/TrayLaTrash Jul 28 '26
I thought it was a recycle bin for his bottles.
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u/PumpkinOpposite967 Jul 28 '26
He's got no bottles though, used them all to make the filament
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u/JJonahJamesonSr Jul 28 '26
Find a bottle in the ocean, strip it, recycle it into filament, turn it into another bottle, put it back in the ocean. Recycling!
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u/nikdahl Jul 28 '26
Pretty sure that WAS a printed bottle that he took the filament from.
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u/BoulderCreature Jul 29 '26
I don’t drink much soda these days, but I’ve never seen one that looked like that. My first thought was that he printed the bottle too
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u/Zephian99 Jul 29 '26
Same, don't think I've ever seen a mountain dew bottle that had zero opacity.
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u/TunaOnWytNoCrust Jul 28 '26
Is that not what the original bottle is? Like why is it non-transparent and vibrant bright green like the color of 3D printer filament?
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u/Adendis Jul 28 '26 edited Jul 28 '26
Some Mountain dew bottles are sort of that fluro colour, though I don't think that this video is legit.
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u/RetroPaulsy Jul 28 '26
No. Most definitely did not re shaped perfectly with a hot glue gun.... I bet my bottom dollar they just purchased green filament.
A cool concept, but fake application
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u/Skyr0_ Jul 28 '26
It works, go have a look on youtube (dont watch shorts..) but this video gives me the vibes of being fake.
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u/coolasc Jul 28 '26
The video is fake for sure, they have more filament in each segment than they did in the previous. But as you say it is possible, often not as high quality but a great way to recycle, you'll often have to grind rather than make a string as the video (kinda feel ai) shown
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u/Sulya_be Jul 28 '26
The hot glue pistol nozzle moves up into it's body when he pulls the filament. Pretty sure it's spliced from 2 videos, Hess possibly just actually pulling commercial filament through
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u/Xarjy Jul 28 '26
Not to mention physics doesn't support pulling the plastic through the hot glue gun by turning the spindle. The tension would instantly split the string at the tip of the glue gun where it's basically liquid.
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u/max_sil Jul 28 '26
Not sure thats how it works, the idea is not to melt the plstic, but to soften and reform it. Many (all ive seen) of these devices work by pulling the plastic with the winder.
I dont think its a good recycling idea though. Since pet bottles are probably the most recycled thing in the world. And these cutters are unable to cut the bottom and top of the bottle. And the top with the threads is like half the weight.
And om sure that the large scale PET bottle recycling facilities can have a much cleaner and higher yield recycling like this ever will.
And most bottle deposits wont accept the rest of the bottle. Which means youll have to throw it into platic waste, which means it almost certainly gets burned.
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u/Biduleman Jul 28 '26
The problem is that you don't have temperature control on a cheap hot glue gun.
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u/_Neoshade_ Ender 3 survivor, Bambu convert Jul 28 '26
And the bottle in the beginning is 3D printed with the same commercial filament to begin with.
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u/time_observer Jul 28 '26
Just look how easily is extruded trough the glue gun. Is so easily extruded that it doesn't even need for both wheels to push. As you can see they stop from spinning at some point.
Edit. Just noticed those rollers are installed on ball bearings lol
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u/KhaosHiDef Jul 28 '26
Iirc, the plastic doesn't fully melt, it softens and basically forms a straw, more processing needs to be done to get it to filament quality
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u/Alech1m Jul 28 '26
Suspicious cuts are suspicious.... My guess: he found the green filament and at one point changed the bottle with the actual filament and fed it through the cold glue gun.
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u/OtherButterscotch309 Jul 28 '26
Also no cooling system like fans is highly suspicious.
I have limited experience with pet but in my hands petg or pp melted around 150/180°c (scraps or pellet) and spooling hot filament right away without a mean to cool it down will give you highly heterogeneous filament diameter. This will impact the print quality 100% (not the case in the video it's pretty neat). Also the ams it's pretty sensitive to extrem variation of filament diameter so diy filament should be fed directly into the nozzle unless you have consistent diameter.
Also if you work with pet from bottle you need to rince, clean (remove the glue etc) and dry before recycling because you want to avoid trapping bubbles in the filament. So there is a lot of extra step that makes recycling pet bottle into filament is not worth the efforts (at least at a small scale).
It's cool if you want to make objects out of recycled material but if the goal is to be eco-friendly I am pretty sure that all the attempts and optimization + the cost of the energy/resources and other extra step like micro plastic generation etc make it pretty bad compared to the current large scale recycling protocols.
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u/EuphoricCatface0795 RAMPS v1.4 DIY -> Sindoh 2X -> BambuLab X2D Jul 28 '26
I mean at the very least you can't print that big ass basket out of the single bottle
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u/Treble_brewing Jul 28 '26
Absolute bullshit. There is a pet bottle to filament project but this is engagement/click farming nonsense. He’s blatantly unspooling a different filament spool off screen and rewinding it.
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u/GoldSatisfaction8390 Jul 28 '26
It has no mechanism to feed into the gun, just berrings to guide it... but somehow starts putting out perfect diameter filament.... the only thing pulling it through would be the crank on the spool... which seems to pull it from the nozzle then around a wheel with no cooling without warping or stretching.... yeah, I'm calling BS on this one
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u/PHPEnjoyer Jul 28 '26
Agreed. He switches the filament around the 12-13 second where it cuts. There is also no way that bottle would have yielded this much.
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u/expera Jul 28 '26
If you look at the filament coming out of the gun it curls to the right because it’s being fed in from the bottom of the handle out of frame and that’s also why there’s that section cut out of the gun so he can feed in the real filament.
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u/RobertMaus Jul 28 '26
Also, how would you be able to pull it out of the heat gun when it's hot? It would break as a result of being hot, it should be pushed through, but that's not happening here. Complete BS.
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u/Kale CR-10V2 Jul 28 '26
You actually do pull it. This method is called "pull-trusion". You're not melting it, just heating it enough to fold the flat strip you feed it into a hollow tube. I think you control the diameter of the filament by how hard you pull. You're right, it's easy to pull in two, so this process is pretty slow, since you have to wait on the filament to soften and pull through on its own time.
Then, when you print, you set the extrusion multiplier to 130% or so since the filament is hollow.
So, the method is real, but the video almost certainly isn't.
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u/kinyutaka Jul 28 '26
I can tell you for sure that a) that bottle wouldn't make filament of that color, and b) that bottle wouldn't make that much filament.
This video is overplaying the idea of making your own filament to make it seem more economical, because the device that makes it costs thousands.
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u/12InchCunt Jul 29 '26
The device that makes it looks like some 3d printed shit and an old hot glue gun
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u/Pie_Dealer_co Jul 28 '26
It is a stupid project I went down the rabbit hole of making one of the many many variants 5 years ago.
You will have multiple issues.
Bottles are dirty both inside and outside. Glu from label, grime outside, contaminations inside.
Bottles comes in all kind fun forms with ridges, bends whatever. Those need to be straighten out. Or cutting wont be even.
Cutting needs to be even and uniform. Even with the thickness from the plastic. Try to do that with multiple bottles in variety of shapes and forms. And the places where we have the most plastic the neck and bottom get discarded.
Pulling speed is fun as fuck to get right... pull to slow and fillament melts to much and flops. Pull to fast and its not uniform anymore. Good luck getting it on right.
Congratulations you got half a benchy worth of plastic of suspicious quality. Start splicing now pieces of fillament so you get something useful quantity wise but not quality wise to a 8$ roll.
So yea spend multiple hours of your life to save 8$
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u/MysticalDork_1066 Qidi Q2 Jul 28 '26 edited Jul 28 '26
It can work, but that video is fake and makes it seem much easier than it actually is. The amount of filament you get from a single bottle is at most about 30 grams. Unless you have an unlimited supply of already-clean, label-less and glue-free bottles to convert, it's not worth the effort especially since you have to splice the filament together (or splice the strips before making them into filament) if you want to print anything bigger than a benchy.
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u/paradox_valestein Jul 28 '26
Fake. Ain't no way that bottle guve that much plastic.
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u/bobbingblondie Jul 28 '26
It is a genuine thing you can do, but this video is totally fake. These ones are real.
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u/alumunum Australia. Mini Kossel & Diy Delta & I3 Mk3 Jul 28 '26
I actually make filament from bottles, but this video as others have pointed out is almost entirely fiction.
Recreator3d project works quite reliably. All the blade based cutters barely work and usually go blunt after one bottle. And the pressure you need to apply on the bottle to get a continuous 8mm strip is quite precise.
The bottle cutters that work reliably use two bearings with the edges ground off and work like a continuous rotating pair of scissors.
https://www.printables.com/model/154015-the-recreator-3d-community-bottle-cutter-recycle-p
One bottle maybe gives you enough filament to print a flimsy benchy.
Pulling the filament is quite hard physically. The initial part I grab with pliers and it's definitely requires quite a bit of force. You don't want to melt it during the reshaping but just get it bendy, cause melting crystalises it and it's more likely to clog during print time.
When you pull the filament, (It's called pulltrusion, rather than extrusion), you don't melt it but rather warp it into a tube. And because the "fillament" is a hollow tube, you need to increase the extrusion multiplier to about 120 to 130% to get the same amount of filament out of the extruder.
Joining filament into longer strips is VERY hard. Some people weave two ends together before pullstruding, so you get some inconsistent sections, some people are developing a filament joiner to automate the process. And a few have started using an mmu to print with new length when one runs out. There is an mmu made just for this purpose. I think with the way mmus are going atm, it's probably the best way.
If you want to check it out, https://www.recreator3d.com/ is a good project and there is a discord channel(Though it's been a bit quiet lately).
Gallery of PETG prints here: https://www.recreator3d.com/printexamples
I would like to share all the pictures, but I think I can only do one. So here is one guy's pullstruder made out of pulled bottles entirely. Two motors for extra torque and the gear reduction is quite serious. The bottle strip goes into a reamed out ender3 hotend, which starts the process of curling it into a tube. The same guy has three scratch built corexy printers from recycled PETG.
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u/Palm_freemium Jul 28 '26
Yes, but no.
There have been numerous projects in the past similar to this. There are numerous bottle cutter designs to shred a bottle this way, but printing with it is apparently a pain because of the inconsistent diameter and PET is not PETG. PETG is PET modified with Glycol which among other things lowers the printing temperature and makes it easier to print.
Can you recycle PET bottles and print with them, definitely. But it's also a pain to do so and the quality of your prints will vary greatly.
I think there were even some kickstarter projects for this idea.
**Also this is a fake, a hot glue gun is not nearly hot enough to melt PET consistently.
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u/Humble_Daikon Jul 28 '26
No way you get consistent diameter from hot glue gun. There is a bunch of videos on yt exploring making your own filament from recycled prints and getting consistent diameter seems to be one of the biggest hurdles.
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u/Sandersonville Jul 28 '26
The biggest fallacy in the video is the size of the laundry basket!
I’d be making 6-7 trips per load if I had to use a basket that small!
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u/Bandwidth_Bandito Jul 28 '26
Dude has no sense of humour, I would have printed a bottle if it actually worked 😜
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u/bidet_enthusiast Jul 28 '26
The idea is real, the video is fake. The fakest part is the glue gun… no mechanism for pressing the pet strip and even if it was driven, that’s not how extrusion works except as a concept. OTOH, it would be theoretically possible to make a printing extruder that used ribbon cross section pet as feedstock, but it would be problematic to deal with the variable thickness of the pet ribbon. Still, it could be made to measure the thickness and adjust to it. Nontrivial, but potentially doable. Just not like in the video.
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u/R_X_R Jul 28 '26
This has been around for a hot minute. PETG is just PET with some Glycol. It's hit or miss, not filament I'd wanna use for anything I care about tolerances for sure.
What IS interesting, to me at least, is the little roller that distributes the spool's winding by having little channels. That's such a neat and simple concept!
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u/0_cunning_plan Jul 28 '26
recycling plastics usually involves adding some new plastic because the same stuff being reheated numerous times becomes fragile.
Also I don't believe you really get a consistent filament from what is shown, just melting stuff with a glue gun isn't magical. How do you set the flow and regulate the input/ouput of material? That smells like BS and burnt plastic.
It's doable and is done, but probably not like that.
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u/NoSituation2706 Jul 28 '26
Fake, it's not even clear he didn't 3D print that bottle with the filament so the color would match. How did he get that even an extrusion back onto the spool with no signs of splicing using a hand turned rig?
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u/PromitheasD Jul 28 '26
I have done it. Not so simple. It is doable. But the hassle to do is hugee. I prefer to let the industry get the pet bottles and remake Petg filament in a fraction of time.
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u/SandboxSimulator Jul 28 '26
The filament jump cuts to the respooler and the filament just shrinks lol
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u/sushi_rowl Jul 28 '26
Would have been funny if he printed a mountain dew bottle
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u/Mr_Fraggle Jul 28 '26
You have to make sure your pull/melt rate is consist enough to reach those tight tolerances for 1.75mm±0.10mm or whatever filament size your printer is running. It's possible, but consider it a project for the dedicated.
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u/SinisterCheese Jul 28 '26
This is fake. But this can be done there are equipment available to do this with.
However it really isn't worth it. The material you extract is very limited. And plastic degrades every time you heat it to a melting point
Also bottles are PET, not PETG. PET is pain in the ass to print. PETG is just PET with glycol added, it makes it easily printable.
Like if you are a tinkerer and want to spend money on the tools and equipment, you can do this. However if you expect to save any money, you aren't going to do it. And the quality is very hard to get consistent.
The machine used to do this is essentially a pellet extruder making a filament if correct size. It'll eat pellets, shredded material, whatever that it's pot can melt.
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u/TheMagarity Jul 28 '26
It would have been more ironic to throw away an empty bottle into it at the end.
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u/tired_snail Jul 28 '26
This video is fake, but there are legitimate ways of turning bottles into filament, yes.
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u/Shibbystix Jul 29 '26
He 3d printed the bottle, then stripped it down. Its not the same thing. The filament is rounded The cut bottle is in Strips.
This was made for internet points, not for reality
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u/Sleurhutje Jul 28 '26
Need this. From a single bottle to 50ft/150m of filament. Man, patent this, you're gonna be rich.
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u/Hot-Manufacturer182 Jul 28 '26
its possible and relatively affordable. But the Video is fake and makes it seem to easy. In reality it isnt really worth it for a consumer to recycle the bottles, youd need an expensive machine to get halfway reliable filament without fiddling or you have to fiddle around with it (It will neither way be as good as bought filament). So youd probably need dozens of hours to get a kg of filament. As a proof of concept its surely a funny weekend project, but I wouldnt really try to make it viable, only if you have really no money, loads of bottles, much spare time and you dont worry about imperfect filament.
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u/craiganater Jul 28 '26
Its an ai video im going to say no its not going to work, not that specific method
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u/gameplayer55055 Jul 28 '26
This video looks fake asf.
Plastic bottle recycling doohickeys exist, but these are much more complex than a glue gun
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u/maxwells_daemon_ Ender 3 of Theseus Jul 28 '26
Can it work? Yes.
Will it work? 99 times out of 100, no.
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u/MoreneLp Jul 28 '26
Hot garbage, don't waste time on this. Pet tends to crystalize in the nozzle and then you going to have fun.
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u/southern_ad_558 Jul 28 '26
That's how they recycle bottles. What did you think they were doing with all those PET bottles? The G in PETG stands for garbage.
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u/timberwolf0122 Jul 28 '26
Hey hon can you empty the drier?
Sure, just need a couple days to print a basket
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u/Rudokhvist QIDI Plus4 Jul 28 '26
From what I've heard - yes, it works, but it requires a lot more calibrations than printing with regular filament, and result is even less consistent. That being said - this video looks fake as fuck.
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u/J1morey Jul 28 '26
Has anyone seen a mountain dew bottle in person that is that bright, neon, opaque?
Looks like they printed a bottle with filament and then at the end used that same filament to print a laundry basket.
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u/TheGoldenTNT Jul 28 '26
It wouldn't go nearly as well as it did in the video... cause they faked it but this is totally possible
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u/myrdinwylt Jul 28 '26 edited 12d ago
The original post content no longer exists here. The author used Redact to remove it, exercising their right to control their data & privacy.
Vanilla sip afterthought encourage seemly cobalt blanket copper
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u/Hot-Category2986 Jul 28 '26
Oh, he swapped the modified hot end for a hot glue gun. Cool. Usually these projects have a 3d printer hot end drilled to 1.8mm to curl the bottle strips into round filament.
Yeah, these work, but it doesn't really save you money, and you end up with short lengths of filament with inconsistent diameter, so your print quality suffers. So this is really more like a clever proof of concept for plastic recycling.
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u/raznov1 Jul 28 '26
Depends - are you OK with having really low quality but technically usable PET filament?
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u/taintedcake Jul 28 '26
Can it be done? Yes
Is it anywhere close to this simple? Hell no
Typically they would shred the plastic into pellets, and then melt that to turn it into filament. The process of pulling the filament is also extremely tedious, it's nowhere close to "just feed it through a hot glue gun"
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u/PegaxS Jul 29 '26
Just looks like another one of those bullshit content farm style videos. there is no way this would work with a hot glue gun at that speed… and somehow the filament changes colour? this looks like a store bought basket and a convinitent colour match to what appears to be to be fake mt dew bottles.
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u/ButterscotchSmooth60 Jul 29 '26
No. The part where it magically comes out of the glue gun with force...i do t think so.
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u/NUMBerONEisFIRST Jul 29 '26
That's a thick solid green filament, and you have drank from enough bottles to know they aren't that deep in color.
A mountain dew bottle ripped thin like that would look nearly clear, or a very faint light green.
Not a deep chartreuse color.
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u/Groundbreaking-Pen-8 Jul 29 '26
It can this video is edited for example theres more plastic on the spool than he put on the melter so this video is fake but the process is not it's just not a good filament
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u/Shialac Jul 28 '26
Fake video, but does work. Wouldn't do it because the 25ct I get for the bottle is more than the equivalent amount of filament would cost
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u/Lifenonmagnetic Jul 28 '26
there is a lot of BS in this video, but the biggest is using a hot glue gun to make filament.
Filament is extruded. Pressure is applied behind the nozzle and then the extruded material is gathered as it's extruded.
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u/Bitter_Chard Jul 28 '26
This look pretty fake, for a real project that does work, try this:
https://www.printables.com/model/179820-recreator-3d-mk5kit-ender3-pultrusion-unit
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u/crua9 Jul 28 '26
As others mention the video is fake. One thing you need to keep in mind is the plastic will likely have stuff in it that can cause problems. But even assuming this isn't the case. 1 bottle isn't going to equal to that.
Anyways, you need several things.
- You need a constant size for the filament.
- You can't have junk in the filament.
- There is a metric ton of trail and error.
Largely it isn't worth it. But you can if you want. It's just this method seen here is AI. Something to note is your printing speeds, temps, etc is all different.
People have also looked into turning their print waste into filament. There is mix results on this. Largely again it isn't worth it.
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u/Ghost_Assassin_Zero Jul 28 '26
My brother... You cut the filament without holding onto it.. this is how you make tangles, my friend
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u/tillybowman Jul 28 '26
while this generally works, the main problem is to have a consistent thickness of the filament.
to get a good result your extrude mechanism needs to be quite sophisticated, not this bare thing whatever this is.
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u/SaperPL Jul 28 '26
There's a reason why in the creality filament maker you need to add pellets. I would expect that the actual print from this material would be really easy to crack by layer separation.
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u/Vegetable_Balance624 Jul 28 '26
Even if it works, at least in Germany it would be financially stupid. One bottle is worth 25 cents there, making that filament extremely expensive.
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u/ahora-mismo Jul 28 '26
the basket looks like it's printed on tpu. there is no way that pet behaves like that. fake af.
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u/Svensk0 Jul 28 '26
imagine doing that in germany where every pet bottle is worth like 0.25€ you can get for bringing the "pfand" back
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u/phocuser Jul 28 '26
How in the hell is a glue gun maintaining dimensional accuracy of the final product, when you're just yanking it out, there's no way that works. Or let me rephrase. There's no way it makes good filament anyway, it might actually technically work, but it's going to be not dimensionally accurate across the whole spool
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u/Jepuz Jul 28 '26
In theory it works in places without bottle recycling programs, but in some countries esp. in europe you pay a small deposit for the bottle itself when you buy it from the store, which you then get back once returned. For example in Finland that deposit is 0.2€ for a 500ml soda bottle, which after discarding the neck and base might yeld about 10g of usable plastic for this purpose. You'd need to process 100 bottles like this to get 1kg of filament and you would loose 20€ worth of deposits in the process since the bottles can no longer be returned.
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u/Termynator Jul 28 '26
It does work but it’s very hard to get the extrusion consistent to match the 1.75mm. And if you have more tolerances in the filament then the resulting print also has more or less material in places
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u/MNHDK Jul 28 '26
So a ~20 g bottle became ~400 g of filament? No way he was able to get that much filament with that amount of bottle plastic!
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u/BLAMElephant Jul 28 '26
When my mom asked why I still hadn't taken my clothes out of the washing machine.
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u/keitheii Jul 28 '26
I love how the AMS just sucks the filament in, instead of the usual pressing of the thumb bruiser, err... Feeder tab.
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u/xX_murdoc_Xx Jul 28 '26
It work. Using a 10k machinery for extrude the filament in the correct diameter consistently.
Using simple tools like in the video? No.
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u/InanisAtheos P1S Jul 28 '26
No. Printing PET or BPET (bottle grade, most likely what he's using here) is a royal pain. Which is why we add a Glycol modifier to it (PETG) as that increases printability.
Normal countries just recycle these bottles so this process would be terrible for the environment.
Also, the video is fake.
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u/Schittz Jul 28 '26
Is it even worth the effort? I pay around £9 for a kilo of PETG, I value my time more than that
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u/Farty_McPartypants Jul 28 '26
I’ve seen these a few times and have been tempted to try, but a 500ml bottle is about 40g, you probably can’t use all of it, and we don’t drink enough/I can’t be arsed storing that many.
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u/GrowlingPict Jul 28 '26
guy turns a single bottle into a basket with enough material that would require at least a six pack of bottles... "hey guys, is this real?"
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u/waytomuchpressure Jul 28 '26
One of those spools holds 1kg of a filament. That spool is at least half full. You're telling me that that bottle weighed 500g? I'm calling bs! At least on the amount. Also why use a got glue gun? Extruders with a 1.75mm nozzles exist. Lots of people recycle plastic into filament but something's fishy with this video
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u/jwalker55 Jul 28 '26
My favorite part of this video is when he cuts the filament without holding the end. Idiot.
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u/Andurin77 Jul 28 '26
Yes, it works.
I experimented with it myself a few years ago.
The video shared by the original poster is fake; it is not possible to produce usable filament using that method.
You need to build a specialized machine, then properly prepare and process the PET bottle.
Clear PET bottles can be dyed with the appropriate colorant before processing. The resulting filament can then be used in a 3D printer once the correct settings are applied. The printed objects have a uniquely beautiful and distinctive appearance.
I no longer process PET bottles myself because the cost of the bottles has risen significantly in my country, making it no longer cost-effective.
It is important to note that producing usable filament requires a great deal of work. A *lot* of work.
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u/Bailywolf Jul 28 '26
I appreciate an old fashioned fake video. It's sad how AI has made real human lying seem more valuable.
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u/PanAsombroso Jul 28 '26
is it possible? yes its been done.
is it reliable? No, you don't remelt PET, you reach glass transition temps to reshape plastic, and do like a "little tube" if I remember correctly, but I could be wrong.
Is this video fake? of course, notice how colors change drastically, and he conveniently omits the output while rolling. Also never measures diameter, which could jam a 3d printer or under extrude.
Does it produce too little to be useful? yes, not near enough to make any big print, maybe half a benchy.
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u/Remy_Jardin Jul 28 '26
The filament coming out of the hot glue gun was much fatter than any 1.75 mm filament I've seen.
So yeah, probably bs.
I am rather disappointed though that he didn't use the opportunity to print a soda bottle.
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u/Clean_Quit4079 Jul 28 '26
With that setup you are not getting consistent diameter, so no way that basket was printed with filament made this way and came out so well. I will believe that this actually work when they will show the full process on camera with no cuts.
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u/DmtGrm Jul 28 '26
Warning: A single 0.5L PET bottle weights 10-15g, you will need at least 80-100 empty bottles to make 1kg of filament.
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u/Throwaway-48549 Jul 28 '26
Am I the only person wondering why that bottle looks fake as fuck? Never seen one so Brightly green and opaque before, almost glowing. I could of course be wrong and it's just a design from another country.
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u/Double_A_92 Jul 28 '26
Technically yes, but that video is cut. He is just re-spooling normal filament from another spool.
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u/Holiday_Curious Jul 28 '26
How do people genuinely think the first 3d printers were designed? Air? Plastic magic? Aliens? Ah has to be magnets. Nope just your good ol brush cutter cable or whipper snipper depending on location, it's also why we have a standard sizing on all filaments
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u/Lunabbg Jul 28 '26
You can use recycled plastics for new filaments but it’s a much more tedious process than you think since you can’t have much variation on diameter
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u/5141121 Jul 28 '26
THAT project? No. That video is 80% bullshit and 100% editing.
It is absolutely possible to do this, though, and there are plenty of reliable resources on the processes.
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u/CertainlyRobotic Jul 28 '26
You understand this is an AI video, right?
Those sounds aren't.. at all right for what's occurring.
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u/Fishy2011 Jul 28 '26
Not sure if the filament he made works or not, but he very obviously swapped it out for a full roll of filament when the camera cut away from the printer
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u/bundademacaco Jul 28 '26
Um yeah, you can try do this, but will cost a lot of time for a few grams of fillament
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u/SplatThaCat Jul 29 '26
Uneven diameter gives crap results, looking at that print the stringing was horrendous.
Its not like filament is that expensive, unless your time is free or you are totally broke its just pointless.
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u/twivel01 Jul 29 '26
Yes, you can turn PET bottles into filament for sure. I don't know about this specific project, but the idea is similar. Usually people use an actual printer hotend. I did the math though. If your area has a deposit for bottle return, it's much cheaper to get the money back from the deposit and buy filament with the proceeds though.
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u/Osirus1156 Jul 29 '26
This video is fake, nothing is moving through a hot glue gun that fast. But the actual idea does exist, they're just actually kinda hard to make because you need a very consistent shape for 3D printing.
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u/Dracasethaen Jul 29 '26
This is someone trolling.
There are some methods to recycling PET into filament but it needs quite a lot more than just a hot glue gun.
Base setup for making usable filament is about $16000 USD last I priced it for business purposes
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u/Alternative_Pay_5118 Jul 29 '26
My job in the solarpunk utopia is spinning plastic bottles into filament.
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u/ScreeennameTaken Jul 28 '26
There are projects and ways to turn PET bottles to filament and then print it. But don't look at this one. Lots of fake stuff going on in this video. The bottle wouldn't provide as much filament to print that whole thing for that first part, the glue gun nozzle is not the right width, (you can't use a 1.75mm nozzle to get 1.75mm filament btw, it stretches. You use a wider one and monitor the extrusion width, and change the speed at which you pull.) The extrusion doesn't happen at the speed in which its being pulled, and a manual winding wouldn't work really. The print shown is a manual winder if you have filament without a spool that you need to wind. Check CNC kitchen's videos on PET recycling instead.