Rich was curious about printing with polycarbonate (PC), but couldn’t find any definitive answers to his questions online. So he bought a roll of 1.6mm PC filament and started experimenting, and his reports are fairly glowing. PC melts hotter than ABS or PLA, is more rigid, and comes out of the printer cloudy, which some have suggested may be due to atmospheric moisture.
Dawei Lin studies DNA at UC, but also started building Lego models of DNA as a teaching tool for his young daughter. At Maker Faire Bay Area 2011 he displays the various DNA models he’s made, while explaining that the act of construction can often be the most valuable learning tool for many different topics.
As I wrote about a month ago, one of the many unusual phenomena Ben Krasnow has produced in his garage is supercritical CO2. As you may recall, Ben machined a custom acrylic pressure vessel so he could get (and give) a good look at a state of matter that most of us have little experience of. Since then Ben has inadvertently had a chance to observe another extremely unusual effect: the carbonation of solid acrylic.
With over 200,000 views, Hayden Parker’s YouTube channel has become a popular spot for watching home chemistry demonstrations. Hayden took his show on the road to Maker Faire Bay Area 2011, where he set up a basic chemistry lab, teaching the science of chemistry and wowing passerby with seemingly magic color-changing chemical reactions.
UK educational supply center centre Mindsets online sells variously-sized 3mm thick sample sheets of Eastman’s Spectar copolyester at not-completely-outlandish prices. Spectar supposedly looks and handles much like acrylic, but with the surprising property that it can be cold-formed without breaking or whitening, and exhibits a memory effect, holding a cold bend until reheated.
Though “plastic” has now largely overcome its “The Graduate”-era connotation of “necessarily cheap, fake, and ephemeral,” it remains the case that plastic objects—especially those manufactured early in the history of plastics technology—present unusual challenges for long-term conservation.
A commenter on my recent post about using cheap paint-stripper DCM to solvent-weld acrylic hipped me to this cool method of making thicker-bodied acrylic adhesives by dissolving acrylic chips in bulk acetone. I haven’t tried it myself, yet, but it seems like a fairly well-known method in the PC case-modder community, among others.
