Yeah, Proto-pasta started the Carbon Fiber Filament Fad and dove head-first into PLA composites almost 2 years ago. As if in-house manufacturing of cutting-edge filament isn’t challenging enough, we design, build, and maintain our own extrusion equipment as well. Its amazing to see where we started such a short time ago! Heralded by the 3DP community for its open style and supporting testing data, enjoy our original campaign here:
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1375236253/proto-pasta-gourmet-food-for-your-3d-printer
Because one campaign wasn’t enough, here is our encore campaign in which we introduced affordable, highly conductive PLA to the market. The brainchild of our founder, Dustin Cram, he was in his true “maker” element cooking up this new recipe on the hot plate! Here is a link to the funded campaign which includes an adequate amount of supporting data as well:
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1375236253/electrically-conductive-pla-3d-printer-filament
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Care to share anything (designs, photos, etc.) of your extruding equipment? u/bramhallo has been posting the results of his work and experimentation in filament recycling, here. It’s clear from the comments on these posts that the community is really excited about this. So far however, there isn’t much out on the market for the would be extruders.
Looking at your website, it is pretty clear that you guys are in the maker-market category and not just another soulless corporate monolith. It would be amazing if you could share some designs with the RepRap and Libre Hardware communities. Imagine all the little desktop variants of your industrial extruders around the world, recycling filament and helping to keep the world a cleaner place!
Anyways, keep up the good work with all of the new filaments, and I hope to see more about your extruder,
-positronicman
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@positronicman @bramhallo Thanks for sharing! This is super cool and I am so jealous about recycling-related experiments. Haven’t been able to do enough here 
Regarding our extruders, we’re pretty open. Actually, at last year’s local Portland, Oregon Maker Faire at OMSI, we installed our production line to make filament live at the event! John Biehler was visiting at the time and did this nice write-up about how filament is made: http://johnbiehler.com/2014/09/21/3d-printing-filament-made/
Between building/improving our extruders AND manufacturing/developing filaments, our 4 person team keeps pretty busy. Add shipping, communication, and family time, and its pretty hard to keep up! We have more ideas than time to execute them 
As cool as it would be to miniaturize our extruders, we prefer the industrial scale for a number of reasons (*insert* another long post here). We’ll probably stick to creating, improving, and possibly reselling our industrial systems. Makes sense for now…
Being self-funded, the reality of operating a business is that you have to push on revenue generating activities if you want stay in business (even when you have a soul…and thanks for noticing). As business improves, we’re more able to interject our passion for the environment. Have you seen our recent environmentally minded and user friendly innovation, recyclable chipboard spools with integrated filament retaining tabs? http://www.proto-pasta.com/blogs/news/17590264-introducing-the-new-proto-pasta-spool
Recycled materials add another level of challenges and opportunity for solutions. Now that we have a firm foundation to create the highest quality filament, we’re finally able to begin considering products from recycled sources, etc.
Pretty awesome to have made it this far already! Can’t wait to see how far we get with your support!!! Thanks, Alex
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Thanks for the kind comments and for sharing the info on how you make your filament! Very interesting to see what an industrial filament production setup looks like. Congratulations on your succesful Kickstarter campaigns and good luck on further improving and expanding your range of filaments!
