What I’m actually planning on making are lace bobbins. There are a couple types but this seems to be the easiest and I’m a beginner with turning.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bobbin_lace#/media/File:Dentelle-IMG_6795.jpg
My plan is to get some pipe nipples and caps for them, wire them together to make them stand vertically so that air bubbles would rise to the top during melting. Does that sound reasonable? I have heard HDPE is good for turning but would a lighter plastic work on a wood lathe? I also have a lot of PP and a fair bit of LDPE. I also have access to a metal lathe but prefer the wood one.
Making blanks for the lathe can be difficult do you have a shredder? if you dont want air pockets you’d have to get the hdpe and ldpe pretty small otherwise you’d need to compress them while heating. I had the same thought but all my blanks ended up with holes i compress them now and works great the plastic is nice and easy to work with and you can get some pretty good results.
Those may be OK for initial compacting the plastic as you load the pipes but the final compression needs a lot more than hand pressure. I would plan on at least large C-clamps pressing on some round stock, with frequent tightening as the material contracts. If you have access to a shop press that is better.
Thanks! I don’t have a shredder at the moment but a guy that I know had an idea about how to scale back the shredder here so I will probably do that. It would pretty much be old milk jugs and I can cut them up a bit so it wouldn’t have to be huge and powerful. I don’t really have a lot of room where I can put something like that. Now I’m thinking about how to make some sort of compression device that would work in several pipes though, just to be sure. This is roughly what I intend to make.
