Category Archives: plastic

Simple Jig Gives Plastic Homes to Orphaned Projects

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Look around your bench and chances are pretty good that there’s a PCB or scrap of perfboard or even a breadboard sitting there, wires and LEDs sprouting off it, doing something useful and interesting. Taking it to the next level with a snazzy enclosure just seems too hard sometimes, especially if you don’t have access to a 3D printer or laser cutter. But whipping up plastic enclosures can be quick and easy with this simple acrylic bending outfit.

At its heart [Derek]’s bending rig is not much different from any of the many hot-wire foam cutters we’ve featured. A nichrome …read more

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DIY Injection Mold Design for the Home Shop

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3D printing is great for prototyping, and not bad for limited runs of parts. Unfortunately though it really doesn’t scale well beyond a few pieces, so when you’re ready for the mass market you will need to think about injection molding your parts. But something like that has to be farmed out, right? Maybe not, if you know a thing or two about designing your own injection molds.

The video below comes from [Dave Hakkens] by way of his Precious Plastic project, whose mission it is to put the means of plastic recycling into the hands of individuals, rather than …read more

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Yellowing: the Plastic Equivalent of a Sunburn

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Your fancy white electronic brick of consumer electronics started off white, but after some time it yellowed and became brittle. This shouldn’t have happened; plastic is supposed to last forever. It turns out that plastic enclosures are vulnerable to the same things as skin, and the effects are similar. Whey they are stared at by the sun, the damage is done even though it might not be visible to you for quite some time.

Photodegradation

Photodegradation is nature’s way of saying you should be playing more video games indoors instead of being outside. The process is complicated and full of …read more

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Designing Products With Injection Molding in Mind

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3D printing is a technique we’ve all been using for ages at home, or via Shapeways, but if you are designing a product, 3D printing will only get you so far. It’s crude, slow, expensive, and has lots of limitations. While it’s great for the prototyping stage, ultimately products manufactured in volume will be manufactured using another method, and most likely it will be injection molding. Knowing how to design a part for injection molding means you can start prototyping with 3D printing, confident that you’ll be able to move to a mold without major changes to the design.

The …read more

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To Deal with Plastic Trash, All You Need is Bugs

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Outlawed now in some places, or only available to tote your purchases at a ridiculous premium, the billions of “T-shirt” bags used every year present a serious waste management problem. Whether blowing across the landscape like synthetic tumbleweeds, floating in the ocean as ersatz jellyfish, or clogging up municipal waste streams, finding a way to deal with them could really make a difference. And finding a bug that eats polyethylene and poops antifreeze might be a great first step in bioremediating the mess.

As with many scientific discoveries, learning about the useful and unexpected eating habits of the larval stage …read more

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To Deal with Plastic Trash, All You Need is Bugs

Posted on by

Outlawed now in some places, or only available to tote your purchases at a ridiculous premium, the billions of “T-shirt” bags used every year present a serious waste management problem. Whether blowing across the landscape like synthetic tumbleweeds, floating in the ocean as ersatz jellyfish, or clogging up municipal waste streams, finding a way to deal with them could really make a difference. And finding a bug that eats polyethylene and poops antifreeze might be a great first step in bioremediating the mess.

As with many scientific discoveries, learning about the useful and unexpected eating habits of the larval stage …read more

Continue reading To Deal with Plastic Trash, All You Need is Bugs→

Broken Plastic? No problem!

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When a computer case has survived several decades from being a new toy through being an unloved relic to being rediscovered and finding its way into the hands of an enthusiast, it is inevitable that it will have picked up some damage along the way. It will be scuffed, maybe cracked, and often broken. If it has faced the ordeal of an international courier after an eBay sale then the likelihood of a break increases significantly.

If you receive a vintage computer in the post and find it cracked or broken, never fear. [Drygol] has a solution, a guide to …read more

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