I’ve seen some strange 3D printing materials over the last few years, but this is a new one: the tape from a VHS cassette. VHS beat out Betamax to become the major home video format during the tape media years, but as new formats emerged, like LaserDisc and DVD, VHS tapes became less popular. You can access miles of tape from just a few cassettes, and Brother figured out how to use all of that tape as 3D printing filament. It’s pretty easy to remove tape from a VHS by pushing a button on the top left of the cassette, which pops the top open, and then you have to press down in the middle of the back of the cassette to unlock it before you can unwind all of the tape. So to create the filament itself, Brother used a homemade, purpose-built press to tightly spin the tape from several cassettes into one strand of 3 mm filament, not dissimilar to how someone would spin flax or cotton into yarn. “The tape filament needs to be heated higher than a standard 3D printer filament so he prints at a much slower rate, but the resulting product is indistinguishable from a normal print except for the color,” Bryan Cockfield wrote in the Hackaday post. He printed a couple of finishing touches out of PET plastic from a landfill, and voila! A cactus pot, emblazoned with VHS on the front, 3D printed out of filament made from old VHS tapes.

Read the full article at 3DPrint.com | The Voice of 3D Printing / Additive Manufacturing