Welcome to a new Precious Plastic video In the previous video, we learnt all about plastic, we built our own machines and we collected the material and now it's time to create new things. So, first we are going to talk a little about different melting temperatures of the plastic. Then, we are gonna talk about mold making, how to make your own molds and where to look out for. And then we are gonna create objects from plastic waste. Let's go! When you heat up plastic it melts, but every type of plastic melts at a different temperature. Now, you can easily look up the melting temperature alone but this is just a number and it doesn't really say much. We wanted to make it to more visual for you guys. So, we did a lot of different melting temperature experiments and made research. So, each row is a different type of plastic and here it is 120° and here it is 218°. And as you can see, some plastics start to melt at lower temperature while others need much higher temperature to melt. And also some materials have a very long melting zone, while others are quite crucial and you need to have the temperature quite accurate in order to have it melt properly. Otherwise, it burns. And this is a usual reference when you start working with plastic to see what it does at what temperature. So for instance, we can see what Polystyrene does at 200°. I have turned this in a poster which you can download and print to put in your workspace, or just watch it. Overall, the principle of working with plastic is that you heat it up, you mold it and then you have it cool down. You can shape plastic in almost any form when it's molten. However, for production, it's better to work with the molds, because you can easily replicate. So metal is a good material because the plastic doesn't stick to it and if it does, you can scrape it off. Next to that, it is durable and it can withstand the heat. Now, our machines work with a whole variety of molds. You can CNC them, you can weld or make them on the lathe. It doesn't really matter that much which technique you use, but the more accurate you make your molds, the more accurate your output which is quite nice because if you put a lot of effort in your mold once you can easily replicate more products. So prototype around with different kinds of molds but make sure your final one is accurate and well made. So now we're going to test a few molds in the machines. First thing we do is we're gonna select which type of plastic we're gonna use. And personally, we like to use ABS, Polypropylene and Polyethylene because we can easily find them around and they are pretty easy to mold into something new. So, the first step is we're gonna shred it. Here we have the injection machine and for this machine we have several different molds. So for instance, we use this one, it's a CNC milled block aluminum and this is nice. However, it is quite an expensive technique to use. So we also made one using the lathes. This is actually the technique we used to make the spinning toy molds. And this is quite easy to do and affordable. Or you make them from some steel and weld it all together. So, let's try this one out. We're gonna make a handle. Plastics. You can tell that it's done when you can't press anymore. Then it should be good. So, now we used a red and white mixture of different colors but as you can imagine, using different colors or separating them you can also make them solid black or blue or create these marble like textures In the extrusion machine you can throw a lot of mixed colors and the nice thing is that it turns around and it blends everything together so you get one nice solid color coming out. It's quite hot! For instance, here we started off with blue and white and slowly added more red. So you can create nice gradients and you
can use it to create new raw material. You could chop it and turn it into new
granulate. Use it to weave something new like this hat, or you can spin it around the tools to create handle bars or get really creative and put a mold over
here where you can turn it around. I mean with just a single line of
plastic you can do a whole lot. The compression machine basically
compresses two plates together. Now, if you're going to add some plastic
in between it squeezes it together so we create these plastic sheets and obviously we can play around with colors and mix them and blend them together to create something spacey or.. not. But we can also get more three dimensional, for instance by adding a texture. But we can even make it more three-dimensional by making more three dimensional molds. This one is from this fruit bowl we make. This way we can create these nice little bowls and containers. Another cool thing is that you can also
make more solid objects and super strong! Now in itself this isn't really useful but if you look at this like wood and use conventional tooling you can create a lot of new things with it. Obviously there's much more possible
with these machines and we barely made a few examples so we would love to see what you can come up with. So if you made something please share it, and if you have any
questions feel free to post the topic in our forums. Alright so that's it for now. I wish you
the very best of luck making things and have fun recycling!
