3D-Fuel has just announced FarmFuel, an incredibly innovative filament packaging system.
3D-Fuel, based in Fargo, produces a wide range of USA-made filament products, with a recent focus on the unusual but powerful PCTG material. Like all other 3D print filament providers, 3D-Fuel packages up their spools in recyclable cardboard boxes.
That’s the problem.
It turns out that if you’re running a 3D print farm with dozens, or even hundreds of 3D printers, you have to deal with mountains of empty boxes and spools. For an individual running a casual 3D printer, this is not a big deal. But for an operation handling hundreds of spools per week, it is a non-trivial amount of effort.
CEO John Schneider spoke with customers and realized this was an increasing issue, so he devised a new packaging solution that basically solves the problem entirely.
This has to be one of the least sophisticated products, yet it is surely going to prove very popular for any 3D print farm. Schneider said:
“Our newest product is a box.”
And that’s really what it is: a box. The concept is to ship ten spools at once, all contained in a box. There is only one box, the one holding all ten spools. The spools are held in place by cardboard dividers inside — everything else is as normal: the same spools, the same vacuum sealing, etc.
There is a restriction, however: there is a limited selection of materials that are enabled for FarmFuel, but that will likely expand as needed.
What about the empty spools that still must be handled? Normally it takes some human effort to carry them to the recycling bin every day at a print farm.
This is the ingenuous part of FarmFuel: save the box, and then put all the empty spools back in their spots. Each FarmFuel shipment includes a return label, so you just send them back to 3D-Fuel, no recycling needed, just some tape on the FarmFuel box.
There’s another benefit here: many 3D print farms attempt to lower costs by using filament refills, which must be mounted on a re-usable empty spool. This again takes time to do, and occasionally the operator messes up and drops the coil. Dropped filament coils are essentially lost at that point because the effort required to untangle them exceeds the value of a new refill.
That’s wasted money and effort, but that never happens with FarmFuel because there are no refills, just regular spools, ready to go.
Meanwhile, 3D-Fuel then creates a never-ending input stream of used spools that they can then refill for use. The spools are not merely recycled as would normally happen; here they could actually be reused for the same purpose.
This is one of the most brilliant packaging moves I’ve seen in the 3D print industry. It’s such a good idea that it’s inevitable that the other providers will cook up their own farm packages.
Did 3D-Fuel happen to patent this idea?
Via 3D-Fuel
