HDPE Fun Facts With Toasters

HDPE Bottle Cap Fun Facts. Here I am doing a quick research project using the HDPE bottle caps people have been bringing me to recycle. Meet your average soft drink bottle lid... 

Firstly.

All HDPE will have roughly the same specifications. It has a Specific Gravity (SD) of 0.95 meaning if you had a cubic centimetre block of it vs a cubic centimetre (cc) of water, the HDPE would weigh 0.95g and the water, 1g. 

That means that the HDPE will float in water, I tested it with my sample - and yes it does. 

1. I used my flat sandwich press which limits the outer dimensions of the piece I can make in it to around 25cm x 15cm. 
2. I could place a grid of 8 bottlecaps across, 4 bottlecaps deep. I placed one of those BBQ protector sheets on the bottom first, left the long edge of it leaning up against the lid of the sandwich press, lining up the 32 bottle caps as close together as I could. 
3. Then I folded the BBQ protector sheet over them, closed the press, and put about a kilo of weight on top. 
4. Switched the unit on and left it for 20 minutes, then did not open the press or remove the weights but left it to sit for another 40 minutes to cool down. 
5. That last bit's important. 
6. For reason A) the plastic is tacky and despite all the non-stick claims for the BBQ sheets, it'll stick and get pulled like toffee if you try to take a peek and you'll end up with a warped sheet. 
7. Reason B) is that even if you don't try to peek between the sheets, as the plastic cools down it'll shrink at different rates depending where it's getting cooled the most, and this will always put a bow in it. (If you don't believe me, make a small thin patch of plastic sheet, peel it off the BBQ sheet as soon as you're able to, and drop it in a bucket of cold water. Scrunch!)
8. By 40 minutes it was still warm but my plan was to put a second layer of bottle caps on, so it was all going back for a second heating anyway. I just eased the BBQ sheet off the top of the plastic (using cotton gloves because it wasn't really all that hot by then - but I recommend good silicone heat-resistant gloves anyway) and added another 32 caps in the same grid pattern.
9. I then proceeded as for step 3 again but set my timer for 30 minutes as there's a bit more plastic to heat up.
10. At the end of that time I again switched the unit off and then walked away - but for at least an hour this time. 

My setup looked like this:

That's around 1kg of lead on top.

And by this time I was trying another experiment with other caps.

You can see why my results have a surface pattern - both from the BBQ sheet and the wrinkles it gets, and also from the fact that for the sake of speed I wasn't "kneading" the plastic in between. Generally when making sheets in a panini press, you (wearing silicon heatproof gloves, of course!) roll and twist and knead the plastic between adding / reheating layers to get air bubbles out, and get a more uniform surface, better colour, and more interesting patterns. (See almost any Brothers Make Youtube video to see how.)

Also note that some presses can fit several layers of bottle caps at a time but I'm not so lucky with this press. Also, most pros recommend that your plastic be shredded and I don't have a shredder nor a burning desire to sit down for two days with plastic bottle caps and a pair of shears cutting all down to shreds... 

(Down near the bottom I have the ideal sheet-making machine I'm hoping to get my paws on one day - it's a teeshirt transfer press but it fulfils my requirements quite well - over 200C temperature available for harder grade plastics, 300mm x 380mm flat rectangular press plates, both heated, locking press mechanism, a timer, and can be readily modified to make precise straight-edged rectangular panels repeatably from most materials. Being able to experiment with one is one of the reasons I ask for donations...)

In the case of the lower image, the bottle caps are off the larger juice bottles but they're still all type 2 (number 2 in a recycle triangle symbol) or HDPE. I could have used all LDPE (4) but it's more flexible and softens at a lower temperature than HDPE. 

As I said, I left the first experiment for over an hour to cool, because it's a bit warm (34C) here so the whole setup was still warm to touch - but also, luckily, the plastic had set solid enough to no longer bow during the remaining cooling. 

And the first experiment result was this:

As you can see, burnt sugars, and you can see each bottle cap still.

The result didn't need to be fantastic for my purposes for it so I decided not to waste too much time on it. Washing it using a reasonable washing system I don't yet have, using hand shears to painstakingly cut it all into smaller more uniform chips (and there's another tool I need, a decent shredder...) was deemed to be too much mucking around for a sheet of plastic I was just going to use for in internal panel that will have stuff mounted on it, out of sight.. 

The dirty looking marks are where there was dried drink on the lids, and because I didn't really care about appearance or strength too much, I left them unwashed. Also, because I figured it out all by myself when my first ever experiment had that same "grotty" look. Drinks (and milk) have sugars in them, the sugar when put in the press and heated gets burnt and "toasted" and also melted into the plastic itself. And that's a problem.

You'll appreciate that whereas with a sheet of clean plastic, I can return all the shavings and trimmings back into the tub to go round again, but once you've got some toasted sugars baked into the sheet, all trimmings will be contaminated with crud you can't get out by washing. 

For my project, this is a sub-panel behind a control panel and will never be seen, there's plenty of room to place it with only minimal material needing to be taken off - and I wanted to show you one of my first "gotchas" I came across. You literally *must* wash every piece with water and maybe a small amount of surfactant (detergent) if you want a good clean output. Don't depend on your collectors to do it...

This shows the importance of having some means to wash and dry your plastic well, why a better press than a sandwich press is eventually going to be on your wishlist too, and for the sake of a consistent output, you need something that will shred or flake the plastic to a small consistent size that will form a uniform product. 

I've got the materials for a decent wash system, and when I build it the documentation will be here. I'm hoping to find a way to shred/grind plastics after washing and drying, and again, if either I get enough in donations to buy one or build one, the build and use will appear here. 

That second experiment

... this seemed like a much better idea in theory ...

... until you consider the wildly dofferent expansion ratios of plastic versus steel ... 

The idea was to put some fine wire mesh in between, but at this scale it does not work ... The steel mesh is fine when everything's melting, it's still sort of fine as everything's cooling down between the plates of the press, but as soon as the pressure comes off . . . sproing! 

It was a first class lesson in first class stuff-ups thanks to my first-class lack of thinking things through. 

What I learned from that

This would probably have worked if there was a 10mm - 20mm sheet of plastic involved, but you need a modified Precious Plastic sheetpress and cooling press set A) that I can't afford and B) that would wipe out all the spare space in my workshop and C) would need a separate mains power line in the workshop. My little sandwich press can barely handle 6mm thicknesses before it can't supply heat fast enough, so the contraction of iron mesh even as thin as that mesh was, will always result in a topographical map.

The idea for putting reinfocing inside a panel came to me because I've previously ironed plastic into cotton cloth, which works a treat and gives the plastic greater strength - just like the glass cloth in fibreglass. Because cloth (or fibreglass cloth) doesn't really expand with heat, and will always let the plastic win the shrinkage contest..

As I said, one could possibly stretch a wire mesh across a Precious Plastic sheetpress halfway up, but you'd need a special split edge form with space for the mesh. And it'd leak plastic, resulting in the top side always having sag. 

The reason I thought of the wire mesh was twofold, A) as observed above, the strength factor, but B) also the fact that mesh as fine as I was using can also help to screen things from electrical interference. It'd be a great Faraday cage if one could connect the edges together and to earth.

Anyhow - this has to wait until I can test it with a tee shirt press converted to mini sheetpress that can make consistent products. I might be able to make 8mm thick sheets on that with a bit of care. 

Re-stocking

We give our 10c Container Return Scheme plastic bottles to a friend's kids, and we keep the bottlecaps because HDPE. But now we've told the kids that if they collect bottlecaps of their other bottles before recycling them for the 10c, I'll pay them a few more bucks. I know, I'm a soft touch. But the kids are saving to buy themselves things and start savings accounts, and I'm happy to help them get some business nous. Plus - I'm slowly getting a 20litre tub filling up with hdpe. 

My hope is to one day be able to put collection bins around the place and collect a useful amount of material. But that means buying or making lockable bins, and driving around town checking and emptying bins regularly. And once I have a system, I can donate it to the local Community House and they can use it to make money for their good works. But I won't be doing it with my pension income.

Anyway - like share bookmark donate - I'll take all the help I can get to get to my next goal of getting a tee shirt press I can make into a sheetpress. Your donations make it possible for me to keep my online stuff online and to keep experimenting and presenting my results for others..

Ruby Tuesday - Meet the laptop

So I've had a new laptop for about a week now and am still nowhere near "moved in" to it. I'm going slowly because my old laptop (Toshiba Satellite Pentiumsomething 4G RAM mechanical SATA 40G or some such originally I upgraded to 240Gb SSD SATA) had some huge number of programs installed on it and I'm not sure which ones I'll keep on it vs transferring to the new laptop. It's also over ten years old and software that used to run on it crawls now, despite completely flattening it and re-installing new W10 on it twice in that time. 

I've had a $300 Ideapad 10" convertible and the wife has a 14" Lenovo of a similar style to the new kid on the block but about four years old now. Most importantly, the Lenis have been reliable - and after my current one, my third Toshie, developed broken hinges leading to a broken casing, I'm regretfully saying buh-bye to the Toshiba brand. 

The 10" IdeaPad has been great for a glorified tablet running W10, and I've used "Lena" as it's known, for about four or five years now as a note taker, Zoom and Skype machine, general take it anywhere machine, and between the wife's Lenovo and "Lena" I'm comfortable around the sleeky little grey/silver machines. 

And apparently (and despite a long career in IT, system and network admin, and freelancing) I'm the least machine-proud person I know. When I was filling in for a worldwide logistic company's IT guy while they went for a six month stress leave, I had to buy a new phone because my current one had bit the dust. I walked to a corner shop near work in my lunch break, found another Nokia that looked like it'd do, charged it, whacked my old SIM in, and rang a mate. This is the conversation:

DD: (the friend) "I thought your phone was cactus? Waaaaasssssuuuuup?" (Yeah. Unfortunately. It was back THEN...)

Me: "Yah I just bought one at lunch, charged it and put my SIM in it. Much better battery life now."

DD: "So? Tell! What have you bought?" 

Me: "Ummm... Hang on. Uh - it's got a salmon pinkish case." (And fair dinkum I had no bloody idea what make or model it was at that stage. And still don't to this day. Nor do I care.)

DD: ". . . kidding, right? Right?"

Me: "fraid not, it was a phone, I needed a phone, now I haz one..."

Pretty much always since starting a full-on career in IT, that's been my attitude. Screw the brand name, screw the accessories and bells and whistles - does it do the job and do it well? - then buy it and set it up, give it to the person it was built up for. Luckily a lot of the office machines, besides compiling software and letting the person program on it, also partook of the daily network FPS deathmatches we ran... So I did get to know the name Radeon pretty well... 

But the thing about getting Toshies was - I got a secondhand Toshiba CHONKBRIK when I needed a machine to take out in the field, and it was surprisingly tough and capable so I was really pissed when one day I went to open the lid and there was a *crack!* and the lid separated from the hinge, the screen cracked across a corner, and that was all she wrote...

I finagled the second one from a supplier at a good price, copied everything off the old hard drive, and had a good machine I was still using six years later when I retired with disability and moved interstate to here. Then one day opening the lid creaked like opening the Great Hall doors at a haunted mansion, and from then on I didn't close the lid... (I did hear that a touch of oil applied with a fine tip syringe helped. And it did, for a few more months, but apparently the issue is mechanical damage inside the hinges.) Then one day the cleaner pushed the lid down when they went to dust...

And now, my latest Toshiba "whatever" has been sitting with the lid open for the last four of its ten years next to a big HP display, with a wireless keyboard and mouse...  "Ruby" will let me roam with my machine again.

It's a bad shot of Ruby but I think we all know what a laptop looks like.

So for the people who will want to know:

Lenovo Ideapad Slim, aka "Ruby" because it arrived by courier on Tuesday 13th Feb, specs etc from the supplier website: Lenovo 14” Ideapad Slim 1 Laptop R5 16/512GB Brand Lenovo Descriptive Colour Cloud Grey Manufacturer's Warranty 12 month Microsoft Office Preloaded Model Number 82R3006CAU Operating System Edition Windows 11 Home Product Dimensions (mm) 325.3W x 216.5D x 17.9H mm Product Weight (kg) 1.38 kg Windows Cortana Yes Connectivity Bluetooth Compatibility Bluetooth 5.1 Internet Connectivity Wireless Wireless Protocols Wi-Fi® 6, 11ax 2x2 Display Anti-Glare Display Resolution 1920 x 1080 Display Size (Diagonal) 14 in Display Type LED Video Resolution 1080p FHD Display Performance Refresh Rate 60 Hz Photo and Video Capture Integrated Webcam Yes Primary Camera Video 720p HD Ports Headphone/Speaker Ports (3.5mm Audio Out) 1 Number of HDMI Ports 1 Number of Networking Ports - Number of USB 2.0 Ports 1 Number of USB 3.2 Ports 1 Number of USB-C Ports 1 USB-C Functions Data-Only USB-C Speed Type USB 3.2 Power Battery Technology Lithium-ion Power & Charging Interface AC adaptor Run Time (Up To) Hours 9.73 hours Processor and Memory 64-bit Computing Yes Graphics Processor Integrated AMD Radeon™ Graphics Max Processor Clock Speed 4.0 GHz Number of Processor Cores Hexa-Core Primary Processor Number R5-5500U Primary Processor Type Ryzen 5 Processor Clock Speed 2.1 GHz Processor Manufacturer AMD RAM Installed Size 16 GB Storage Hard Drive Capacity 512 GB Installed Storage Type SSD

And straight away I can tell you that the claimed max battery life is not all that. I tend to leave power save settings on the performance side because otherwise why did I buy a new faster machine to run updated software? - And so, I get about five hours. 

Other than that, I still don't much like W11 and may yet retrograde to W10, who knows? I don't do Evil Things on my machine and it's set up as a work machine so there's nothing worth Microsoft's time and processing cycles to exfiltrate, either. I might grit my teeth for the moment and keep using it, maybe even set it up with a linux or ReactOS and see how they go. 

I'm reasonably comfortable around touchpad use, but I got a $20 BT mouse because I prefer a scroll wheel to a two finger drag. Speaking of which "Ruby" has 2,3, and 4 finger drag actions, most of which I'll never use, but it's good to know I can 3-drag up to open task window views and left / right to select one, but alt-tab also still works, y'know? 

Anyway - you may be wondering about how I could afford the princely sum of AUD$808 and maybe donations have helped finance the machine but no - I took out some superannuation since I'm now fully entitled to. Previous donations went to pay some part of the online fees I rack up for the hosted WP blog and domain names, and that's all she wrote. If you'd like to help, I direct you to the last part of this post, visit my Ko-Fi page and send me the price of a cup of coffee perhaps. 

As always - stay awesome!

Gluing Bits Of Wood Together.

I've heard this over and over and over and over. And it's always so controversial; "This works!" vs "It'll never work!" My experience has been the latter.

It's the old argument about gluing endgrain wood. There aren't many that say that gluing endgrain to endgrain is actually a solid way to join, nor that gluing endgrain into a longitudinal grain is all that much better. 

But for better or for worse, the whole topic has just had a mini revival with the video by Wood If I Could. She feels strongly that gluing endgrain onto anything else needs mechanical help, from wiggle nails, dowels, biscuits, tenons, or screws. I have to agree.

It all stems from a video two years earlier when someone else proved that it doesn't matter because glue is stronger than wood fibres. And - sort of - that make sense until I try an experiment or three. But people tried to interpret that video as saying that endgrain joints are as good as longitudinal grain joints - because glue. Yeah. So ya!

Stumpy Nubs also picked the actual point of the OG video - that glue is way stronger than wood. Because glue. But he also seemed to miss the point. I could glue a square centimetre of steel to the end of a block of wood, and another square cm to the side. I can tell you the the steel will hold, the glue will hold - but the piece on the endgrain will come off much more easily than the piece on the longitudinal grain.

Errrhem!

It's one of the tyhings I do - in my opinion, badly - but still something I'm working on improving in. So I dunno about great carpentry and woodwork. In fact, I don't even do mediocre carpentry and woodwork. But I've also been around the traps and this gluing issue has happened to me at times:

"WTFSM is going on with this *&%$!##* join? Why will it not stay glued? AARRGGHH!!!!"

The Flying Spaghetti Monster never answers me. 

Over the years I've come up with an inkling of why it happens that when I glue two planks side by side after carefully straightening and dressing the edges, they stay glued to the point that I can often split one of the boards before the glue joint will let go.

And conversely, no matter how well I dress the ends of two boards and glue them up, they tend to fall apart when I put just a little bit of pressure on them...

It helps to imagine what goes into trees  when they're making treewood. ("Treewood "- hat's a technical term from my old man right there, if I pointed at a tree and asked what it was, he'd say, in all seriousness, "why that, that's bird-sitting-tree-wood." But he really could tell lumber apart by the look and smell of it, dozens of different types. Made me feel a bit uneducated about woodworking, and determined to do more until I became a bit educated. Anyway - back to treewood.)

As WIIC says, trees need to get water and nutrients up their wood, or they woodn't (hehehehe yes pun intended) survive. So the fibres in a tree trunk run lengthways, from the roots to the crown. The tree has capillaries running the length of them. Capillaries, you can picture as thin long straws.

When we saw a log up, we split it lengthways as that's the way you get long planks. The planks have all these little straws running the length of them. This also makes planks strong in one direction, and carpenters and woodworkers spend all their time dressing the wood to show off the grain of those capillaries, and plan their projects to use the wood in the optimal orientation so that the project will be strong and look good.

But sometimes you have to join the end of a plank to something else and that's when the fights start. If you're in one of those fights right now, use this analogy:

The Bundles Of Straws

Imagine a piece of wood as a bundle of straws. In fact, take a bundle of straws, and glue them together side by side until you have a shape like a plank that's 10 straws wide and 3 straws high. Just one length will do. It was relatively easy to glue the straws together side by side like that because there's so much surface area along the length of each straw for the glue to stick to.

Now make a second, identical plank and let them both dry for a few days side by side. Now try to glue them together end to end... 

And that's it. The whole lesson. Gluing two straws together end to end is a damn sight harder to do, and has a damn sight less strenght, than gluing two very short bits of straw together side to side. Even if the glue IS stronger, it doesn't matter because you can break the tips off capillaries easier than you can separate capillaries glued side by side.

Solution to one flockintech at least

Before you read this, please scroll down to the bottom of this article and take action. Thank you.

I've mentioned on my other blogs about "Lock-in Technology," which I refer to as flockintech. I've also posted about "bottlenecks" which get between us and technology, and suggest that maybe technology needs to become less intrusive and more ubiquitous, and that AI is still a long way from being fully and advantageously used for our betterment.

And this article details one piece of flockintech, and one CEO's precise impression of the people his company aims to serve. Totally treats each one of us as a minuscule annoyance he has to put up with for that extra half a cent in his annual salary... 

My Brilliant Take: 

USE AI! USE AI! USE AI! USE AI! USE AI! USE AI! USE AI!

The stupid "protection" on some basically really stupid ink cartridges must be fairly easy to reverse-engineer. Using AI to poke and prod at various cartridges and printers should give us an easy way to make any and all 3rd party cartridges work just fine.

We have this technology, let's stop using it to make fap-worthy faerie warrior maidens and start a war against lock-in technology! We have some rwally really REALLY clever people out there who are looking for challenges that'll make a difference. This is one such. Go for it!

Before you ask, I don't really write programs. I write some basic code to accomplish simple tasks and my brain even rebelled at anything more than BASIC and some batchfile commands. Doinmg what it takes to teach "AI" to be "Any Kind Of I" is way beyond my pay grade. But you may know someone. Pass this post on!

It took hackers to fix Polish trains that were locked-in by their manufacturers - we need hackers now that will forego the huge FOSS projects and concentrate on these smaller, but oh so much more impactful projects. To me, teaching an AI to hack printer cartridges is black arcane magic. To someone out there, this may just be a trivial exercise. Posts like this one need to be passed on - please be one of the passers-on!

And that's it, really, you're right, this could have been a toot - but some messaging services still have a ridiculous character limit. 

Before you go, life here has become immeasurably harder due to a long-term health issue in the family, and I am hoping I can rely on you to do that - pass this post and others like it on via your social networks, pass the link to Ted's News Stand on so people get to read some of my other recent posts, and if you at all can, please donate. Links in the graphic: