Recycle 3D Prints and other Plastics at Home | Plastic Shredding | BB3D MK3

hello my name is ryan from buster beagle 3d today i'm going to go over how to recycle plastic from 3d printing to milk and drink bottles to leftover plastic from injection molding i'm going to show you how easy it is to do it from the comfort of your own home using various methods so let's get started [Music] so basically i'm going to go over how to take different types of plastic and essentially break them down into small enough pieces that they can be used for something else i personally am going to be using the plastic in my buster beagle 3d injection molding machine mk3 it's a do-it-yourself injection molding machine that i have released plans to and you can check out on the link above or take a look at the other models on my youtube channel that of course is only one option maybe you want to make your own 3d filament or other various functional or craft projects from plastic pellets if you check out the precious plastic website you can see tons of ideas of how people are recycling their plastic waste into something more useful the first thing i'm going to recycle is pla from 3d printing this process is not exclusive to pla but since it's what i print 99 of the time it's what i have a lot of ways from if you're like me you have 3d printed rafts and supports and even some prototypes and failures that you would rather do something with rather than tossing them into the trash so there are large shredders that i will get into in a little bit but i wanted to see if i could break this plastic another way and potentially a simpler way enter the blendtec blender if you guys remember those viral videos back in the day where the ceo of blendtec would ask will it blend then stick all types of crazy things inside the blender from iphones to golf balls and marbles and then chop them up if you can chop up a golf ball then why can't i chop up some 3d prints the same way so i bought a used blendtec blender off of ebay for about 70 bucks to test it out i dropped in a bunch of rafts and failed prints skirts and other types of pla and gave it a shot i didn't want to over chop up the plastic by turning it into powder so i would press and release the pulse button on the machine to just break everything down enough i then would pour the plastic out onto this grilling pan with holes that i bought so that i could filter out the larger pieces and let the small ones fall through i would then throw the pieces that could use a little bit more chopping back in the blender you can even take the entire container of chopped up plastic and throw it back into the blender and chop it up even more it actually did a pretty good job of pulverizing the plastic pla is a more brittle type of plastic so it really did an excellent job of breaking that plastic down one thing to watch out for is that plastic will fly everywhere if you're not careful the regular top of the blender has holes in it which may allow for the plastic to go flying so i 3d printed another stopper for the top to seal the blender up a little bit better also i have to say as a disclaimer that this is not what this blender is intended for so attempt this at your own risk the whole time i was doing this i was wearing eye protection as well as other safety precautions i wouldn't try this with any old blender but this blendtec blender is a bit of a beast this worked really well with the more brittle 3d printed plastic but wasn't a great choice for some of the other more solid and flexible plastics that i'll go over now so if you have kids like i do you might go through a lot of milk bottles i did another video a while back on how i recycled this hdpe plastic using the older version of my injection molding machine the problem was that i broke everything down by hand and it took longer to melt because the pieces were still too big i needed a faster and easier way to not only cut it up but to do it in smaller pieces the first thing i tried was a regular paper shredder but i didn't really have much luck with that then i remembered i had a paper shredder that could also break up credit cards that worked a little better but still not great even if it had separated the plastic into the cross-cut pieces it was supposed to i still would have wanted smaller pieces i wanted to try something with a little bit more power i found a bunch of youtube videos by a user named diy chen that goes over how to make your own heavy duty shredder he has created a bunch of them and also has a website where he sells some of the machines already put together i purchased one of these from him and it arrived in a reasonable amount of time with everything you would need to get started it was designed with a worm gear reducer that allows you to increase the torque on the machine without exerting tons of force it also comes with an adapter that can be attached to a regular hand drill to operate the machine i wanted to spruce it up a little bit so i designed a 3d printed hopper to keep all the plastic in the jaws i then added this electric scooter motor that i had lying around for years i knew i kept that for something then i added a gear on the shaft a drive chain and a scooter controller and a 24 volt power supply off an old 3d printer i then added a switch to control the direction of the motor as well as a 1.5 k ohm potentiometer to control the speed of the motor i even designed a top for the hopper to keep the plastic from flying out and from little fingers going in as you can see from these hdpe milk bottles it does pretty quick work of this type of thickness of plastic the machine is not huge so i did need to cut up the bottle some but not a lot i also ran the shredded material through the machine a few times to break the plastic down even further as you can see you are left with some pretty small pieces of plastic that should work great in the injection molding machine the only real downside to this machine is that you want to be sure to clean out the machine very good between different types of plastics to make sure you're not mixing different colors or plastic types if you didn't intend to the next thing i wanted to do with this machine was to break down some polypropylene that was left over from the injection molding machine this can be runners or sprue material or even failed or unwanted parts these can be quite a bit thicker than the milk bottle so let's see how they do with a little work and patience it worked just fine i even dropped some fairly thick pieces in there and it still gobbled them up now i'm only using a 24 volt 300 watt motor since that's what i had lying around you could use a 24 volt 500 watt motor or a 36 volt 800 watt motor or even higher to run this machine and that extra power can make for even quicker work of this okay so now that everything is chopped up i heated up the buster beagle 3d mk3 and decided to test out the hdpe first i had made this little fishhook mold on my 3018 cnc a while back so i thought it'd be perfect for this plastic this particular machine can make up much larger objects up to three cubic inches in volume but i'll use this small one for a test [Music] [Music] there you have it a little fish hook that can be made into a necklace made from recycled milk bottles next on to pla for this i'll be using this little maker coin mold that i have to test out again this machine is adjustable to not only shoot the smaller molds but also much larger and even 3d printed molds but for simplicity's sake i'll stick with these smaller aluminum ones [Music] so [Music] as you can see the pla fills the mold quite nicely and rather than seeing the 3d printed lines anymore with the pla you have a solid object that is much stronger and much finer detail that i could ever get on my regular printer using pla and finally for the polypropylene i have this little knob that was used on the original buster beagle 3d injection molding machine it works just fine and now any extra runners or sprues i have from these new parts can go back into the process to shred again and use for another part so that's it please do check out the diy chen videos for how he created his machine and visit his website if you're looking to pick one up my guess is that he's about to sell out real quick so you can always check out the precious plastic bazaar for other pre-built shredder machines as well as plans to make your own thank you so much for watching and if you'd like this video please do hit that like button and consider subscribing for more content having to do with injection molding 3d printing laser engraving cnc and all kinds of maker things coming up thanks again be safe and we'll see you next time

Channel: Buster Beagle 3D®

Views: 98,807

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Id: v-JlT3EZ1uo

Length: 10min 18sec (618 seconds)

Published: Sun May 15 2022