I have been toying with the idea of creating a custom extruder/hotend to handle the arc of the ribbon of PET being fed to it. Sounds like a complex proposition.

So I came up with the idea of rolling the ribbon into the right size for a hotend.

The ribbon will follow this course:

1. Comes out of bottle cutter
2. Travels through arcing bearings (passive)
3. Arc passes through tubulator
4. Tube is pulled through extruder drive
5. Into hot-end

The design of the tubulator (tm pending:) ) will be similar to an open ended flatbread wrap.

If the ribbon is too rigid to form easily, or too resilient once fomed, heat could be applied somewhere along the path of travel. The intensity of the heat would have to be quite low as to maintain a bit of form. If form is not maintained, travel and distribution of material could both get messed up.

May include an explicating drawing shortly...