A few weeks have passed since the Atlanta Mini Maker Faire 2011 and I’ve been enjoying some follow-up visits with some of the many makers I met at the event. Time was short during the one-day fair, so I didn’t get to visit much with Alliene Bouchard, an Atlanta-based maker. Alliene (pronounced Ollie-yen) impressed me […]
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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.
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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.
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This is a piece of free-burning ABS tubing showing characteristic flame color and smoke. The burn test, as it’s known, correlates a plastic sample’s composition with a set of observable properties including…
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We have hundreds of posts in the archives with the keyword “plastic” in the title, but many of them are about particular objects made from plastic, rather than general methods for working with plastics. So I went through and cherry-picked ten of what I considered to be the more inventive and unusual methods-based “plastics” posts. The photos aren’t sexy, but if you’re interested in weird things you can do with plastic, at home, this is the post for you. And some of these methods will probably turn out to be not so “stupid,” after all
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At extremes of temperature and pressure above a substance’s so-called “critical point,” the distinction between liquid and gas phases of that substance stops being meaningful, and the substance enters a homogeneous “supercritical” phase. For many substances, supercritical temperatures and pressures are difficult to achieve, and that’s doubly true if you’re hoping to achieve them under conditions that still allow for visual observation.
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Here’s an extremely innovative idea from Yi Lu and Yu Xiang at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, just published in Nature Chemistry. Medical demand for home blood glucose monitoring equipment has led to the development of inexpensive, accurate, and widely available electronic instruments that can measure glucose levels in blood. Some modern personal glucose meters, or PGMs, cost as little as $10.
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