Cool vid from our pals at TAP Plastics showing how to build a strip heater, which is commonly referred to as a “plastic bender,” but really doesn’t do any bending in and of itself: It’s just a long skinny heating element that makes it easy to soften a sheet of plastic along a straight line, so you can bend it with your hands to an arbitrary angle, and/or against a jig for more precise control of the bend.
A while back I did some experimentation with stewing plastic bags in canola oil and then pressing them into solid forms. The process I followed used this method for molding a self-lubricating replacement bushing on a washing machine. While the results were certainly interesting, they had a side-effect of being impregnated in the oil, leaving grease stains in their path forever.
Admittedly, “art” may be, ah, stretching it a bit, but hot-pulling scrap styrene model sprue over an open flame to make plastic rods of various thicknesses is a classic technique in plastic model-building. The resulting material can be as thin as a human hair, and commonly finds use in scale modelling as antenna aerials, wire, bolt heads, etc.
Learn plastic welding through this black-and-white Seelye Model 63 Plastic Welder manual.
Interesting homemade tool from Instructables user Random_Canadian. The melt chamber consists of a length of 3/4″ iron pipe, the piston head is an off-the-shelf socket wrench, and the piston rod is a socket extension. A temperature controller, a couple of eBay cartridge heaters, a few tufts of fiberglass insulation, and some odds ‘n’ ends make for a heating system. And a brass hose barb serves as the extrusion nozzle
From James Bruton of XRobots.co.uk. James’s take on the familiar vacuum forming machine uses a three-layer MDF sandwich for the vacuum box and forming table, with a vacuum cleaner hose connected at the bottom. His heating system is novel, in my experience, using an off-the-shelf quartz room heater at the bottom of an MDF “chimney” lined with aluminum foil reflectors.
Good-looking clear plastic version of Matthias Wandel’s wooden Jenga pistol, from Instructables user Jayefuu. Jayefuu uses a laser cutter to make the flat parts, and the vector art is freely available.
