New extruding beam technique

Precious Plastic Machine Development
#1

Yesterday while meeting people working on Precious Plastic in Barcelona I ended up at Ateneu Barcelona, a kind of city-supported Fab Lab. They contact me saying the have been working on PP for the past few months and wanted to show me their progress. Thought I’d drop by.

And to my great surprise I found, on top of our “best seller” shredder, a series of low tech PP machines to make beams that work super good with very smooth results. Here is a few pics.

Again, make sure to share your work or no one will ever be able to spot it and help you develop it further /:

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#2

This looks good 🙂 Do they have a FB page or website we can view?

#3

I was thinking of filling the pipe and having a threaded bar with a tight fitting disk on the end put through an end cap that screws onto the pipe then when upto temperature screwing it down, anybody tried that or think it wouldn’t work? Edit, Ah just saw I could click a larger image so think that is better than my idea!

#4

In case anyone is interested, there’s an online calculator where you can calculate the lenght, gauge and volts required to heat the nichrome wire to the desired temp

http://www.jacobs-online.biz/nichrome/NichromeCalc.html

#5

That’s awesome, I have been thinking on a system like this using several heating bands along the barrel, but this approach looks cheaper

#6

Yes sir.

1. Yes, and at the end there is an opening for the thermometer
2. Yep.

Apparently the project was developed by a brazilian guy trying to simplify the machines for rural brazil. Gotta admit, I like the approach 🙂

#7

@mattia-io,
So do they (1) fill in the pipe with their extruder, keep it heated with the nickel wire and use the funny press system to compress the beam inside?

Or **(2) **they don’t have the extruder, they just fill in the pipe with shredded plastic, melt it with wire and compress?

#8

Some more tests

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#9

Really smooth beams, almost perfect I’d say

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#10

Funny pressure system

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#11

Nickel wire to heat the barrel

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