Collaboration

 Joining the plastic (and other) waste material recycling is Grumpy Old Guy. This is a fun account to follow, with some social commentary and I enjoy it. But that account's donations and mine are now all going towards us making new machines and technology for recycling plastic and other materials. It means I don't have to keep buying parts out of my limited budget and can start working a bit faster on the development of these things.

What Am I Working On?

I started with simple things - bought a flat plate sandwich griller (aka a panini press and other such names) and made a few flat plates and sheets out of various plastics. To stop the plastic sticking you could use baking paper but I was lucky enough to have had a silicon/carbon fibre BBQ sheet, which worked well.

Far better than my fingers and an old oven mitt did to protect me while releasing the plastic and folding it to exclude air bubbles . . . 😬 (You have to get the bubbles out to get the plastic properly flat, but with my gear I can't, so I've made a feature out of it . . . hehehe . . . )

But I found I could make sheets with HDPE, LDPE, and PP plastic. And when I buy a decent set of heatproof silicon gloves I should be better equipped to work with hot plastic. 

I was also able to laminate some decorative patterns cut from things like TP pack plastic (just big plastic bags with "extreme softness" and similar toilet paper slogans printed on them) between laminating sheets and that has me thinking that I could laminate multiple layers of bags like that and shopping bags and rice and pet food bags between two silicon sheets and produce quite hard and hard-wearing plastic sheets for turning into sides for enclosures, cover sheets, etc. 

I decided not to test anything with that much thickness on our little A4 laminator as it's for office use, but will be looking out for sturdy A3 machines I can possibly modify for this purpose, but once again it needs money so it's on the backburner for now.

Have spent several hundred instead on cartridge and sleeve heaters and control boards and am now just waiting to save enough to buy some motors and PID temperature controllers I can almost go for Phase 3.02.a (OK that's just a bullshot number but I'm trying to tell you that I have a HUGE list of experiments I'm working on) once I can afford it, and that'll be an injection molding machine. 

I have ideas for making injection molds out of PET plastic because it's higher temperature than the soft plastics, and making pressing molds (Phase 3.03.d !!!) out of whatever plastic so I can stamp metal molds out of tin and aluminium (Phase 3.04.a) and use them to line the PET molds as they'll add temperature shielding and endurance to the PET (Phase .01.a) so that I can then injection mold useful items.

And once I manage to have enough to commission a local engineering company to make a steel press frame and a few blocks for me I should be able to equip that to pressure press flat sheets that are much more uniform and dense, drive the injection molder, and so forth. And stamp more aluminium and steel sheets for yet other molding including turning old cardboard into pressure-molded containers, environmentally friendly packaging, and so forth. 

From that to food-safe bowls and so forth is just a materials change away. And suddenly I'd be able to recycle plastics, thin metals, plastic bags and old cloth and other materials, and so forth. 

That's sort of the current state of play, loads to do and not enough resources to do it with.