Collaborate Disseminate
Between failed prints and iterative designs that need a few attempts before you nail them down, a certain amount of wasted material is essentially unavoidable when 3D printing. The good news is that PLA is a bioplastic and can be broken down via industrial composting, but even still, any method …read more
Continue reading From Fail to Wail: Guitar Picks Made from 3D Printed Waste
We’ve all encountered the odd plastic part that is broken and unobtainable. Sure, 3D printers can print big replacement parts, but sometimes you just need to rebuild a very specific piece. [AkBkukU] shows off a technique for doing just that using a process you could almost call manual 3D printing. …read more
Continue reading Hacking Broken Plastic Parts without a 3D Printer
Whether it’s wood, metal, plastic, or otherwise, when it comes to obtaining materials for your builds, you have two choices: buy new stock, or scrounge what you can. Fresh virgin materials are often easier to work with, but it’s satisfying to get useful stock from unexpected sources.
This CNC router …read more
Continue reading CNC Machine Rolls Up an Axis to Machine PVC Pipe
An errant wire snipping across the wrong electrical pins spells the release of your magic smoke. Even if you are lucky, stray parts are the root of boundless malfunctions from disruptive to deadly. [TheRainHarvester] shares his trick for covering an Arduino Nano with some scrap plastic most of us have …read more
Recycling beverage cartons isn’t 100% efficient. The process yields some unusable garbage as a byproduct. Why? Because containers like juice boxes are mostly paper, but also contain plastic and aluminum. The recycling process recovers the paper fibers for re-use, but what’s left after that is a mixture of plastic rejects …read more
Continue reading Innovative Bird Feeder Design Recycles Recycling’s Garbage
It’s as if the go-to analogy these days for anything technical is, “It’s like a series of tubes.” Explanations thus based work better for some things than others, and even when the comparison is apt from a physics standpoint it often breaks down in the details. With microfluidics, the analogy …read more
Continue reading Making Microfluidics Simpler With Shrinky Dinks
Plastic pollution claims another one. Continue reading A Dead Whale with 88 Pounds of Trash in Its Stomach Washed up in the Philippines
The process could help convert millions of tons of plastic we generate every year into an gasoline and diesel-like fuel. Continue reading Researchers Developed a Technique to Turn Nearly a Quarter of Our Plastic Waste into Fuel
If anything ends up on the beds of hobbyist-grade laser cutters more often than birch plywood, it’s probably sheets of acrylic. There’s something strangely satisfying about watching a laser beam trace over a sheet of the crystal-clear stuff, vaporizing a hairs-breadth line while it goes, and (hopefully) leaving a flame-polished cut in its wake.
Acrylic, more properly known as poly(methyl methacrylate) or PMMA, is a wonder material that helped win a war before being developed for peacetime use. It has some interesting chemistry and properties that position it well for use in the home shop as everything from simple enclosures …read more
Some people are mad that Gillette released an ad calling out toxic masculinity, but the bigger issue is the waste produced by disposable razors. Continue reading Don’t Boycott Razors Because of an Ad, Boycott Them For the Planet