I'm already thinking of ways to automate this machine to "print money".
Run a fan at the end of the filament guide. Then, attach a mouse recovered wheel encoder to monitor amount of filament extruded. Then make a simple geared wheel that turns the rate equal to extrusion (with some given slack). You can even stagger it the similar way a yarn winder weaves on the coil, to allow even fill on the spool.
After the circuit monitoring this process indicates the right amount of filament on spool, it kills the system and alerts operator to finish spool prep.
I could probably make a tidy profit if I made 20 machines and undercut filament prices of everyone on the market now. And even charge a bit extra for customized filament color (mixing beadstock would be easy).
What would likely help that even more is to do it in some larger spools (say 20kg spools) so that you can do larger runs and then chop it up later. There is a possible market here to do that, but I don't know what kind of margins you could expect; I've got no idea what the power the filament extruders use. I'll know when/if I finally get my filabot from the kickstarter, it's a very very similar design to lyman's but came a bit later. The main thing I'm after for it is that it'll come with a grinder to let me take things like plastic bottles and try to print with PET plastics and other strange materials.
Run a fan at the end of the filament guide. Then, attach a mouse recovered wheel encoder to monitor amount of filament extruded. Then make a simple geared wheel that turns the rate equal to extrusion (with some given slack). You can even stagger it the similar way a yarn winder weaves on the coil, to allow even fill on the spool.
After the circuit monitoring this process indicates the right amount of filament on spool, it kills the system and alerts operator to finish spool prep.
I could probably make a tidy profit if I made 20 machines and undercut filament prices of everyone on the market now. And even charge a bit extra for customized filament color (mixing beadstock would be easy).