A big thank you to everyone for the feedback :) I am pretty much blown away by the positive response! It really keeps me motivated to push this project! Big big thank you!
What a fantastic project! it is both aesthetically good to look at and functions really well! The price point could be a sticking point as well as getting the molds. Have you thought about the mold supply chain? You need to make the design process and manufacturing process easy for the general public. Perhaps a partnership with Makera that makes the Carvera desktop CNC. That machine would be able to make the molds/dies for your machine. Alos think about targeting universities and technical collage's as buyers of your product. They could actually teach the whole process from designing the mold/die's through to the finished product.
You should contact Stefan from CNC Kitchen. He is a big advocate of plastic recycling and is well known in the 3D printing community. Maybe you can make a video together.
Hell yeah mate. Use-case aside, building a machine / tool to address a purpose because you couldn't fine one on the market is awesome. Toolmaking is such a cool practice and way less common than it should be.
This is super cool! Precious Plastics has been on my radar for a while now, but one of their weaknesses has always been the injection molding side of things, IMO. This really ups the game!
@@Z-add i didnt say it'll kill you. i said look like. i know theres many desktop machines out there, i own one. but majority of them look very diy or industrial even for a small machine. this design bears a resemblance to the machine micromolder, which i really like the look of.
@APxKP thanks for the shout-out! The esthetics of his enclosure design are noteworthy, but he failed to duplicate our engineering, and the parts that are demonstrated in the video are parts that would be re-ground and processed again due to quality issues.
I think the answer to "why not change that" is that its much cheaper and more efficient to do it on a large scale. Sort of the reason factories exist. This is super cool though!
Hello Maeder. I am developing a similar machine to yours using pnematic cylinders and tailored to the Nigerian environment. Good job to your project and good luck in winning the James Dyson Award.
If you could extrude the recycled plastic into 3D printer filament, it would be incredibly easy to turn household plastic waste into parts for any application you could think of. It won't have the same strength as the molded parts, but the versatility would be great for home and garage projects. Great job with the incredible recycling concept!
Looks awesome man! It would be great if there could be some kind of shredder on top. Shredding the plastic to small pieces can be quite difficult without a proper machine. Is this only for a specific type of plastic like PET or ABS? Or are you able to combine the plastic pieces and create something from a mixture of plastics?
Hi :) thank you very much.. that would be cool indeed. For now I mainly used PP because mixing is not a good idea. PP worked really well so far and is very common in German post-consumer waste
I love the idea. The only issue I see with it is similar to those with traditional injection molding: you need highly specialized molds that are usually quite expensive. Have you ever considered creating a simpler application of this technology, like a 3D filament maker or something along those lines? If so, what made you choose an injection molder? Congrats on this machine. It looks extremely clean and well-thought-out.
@@manutechlab for what it's worth, I think it's great that you're not crowdfunding it just yet. I bet you'll learn a tonne shipping the next ~10-20 units out for testing; having the time to get the machine working well in support of new use-cases, without the pressure of shipping an unfinished product to backers before you're 100% happy with it. Definitely support selling a bunch of "tester" machines to local companies and pricing in "support services" to adapt functionality of the machine as needed though! Love the project.
Man I'm grateful for my algo serving this up! Dude this tech is amazing, well done. Imagine this being implemented into kitchen cabinetry one day, even including the plastic shredder. Rather than putting my plastic bottle into the recycling, I clean it up and put it straight into your machine. So cool, well done again.
I still have to work on that, thats true. The product is very much usable but the optics I still have to get right. Someone with some experience in injection molding could definitely help, that would be very much appreciated :)
So awesome! I hope these are available to buy someday! I would definitely get one! Feels like form factor wise my instinct would be to orient it vertically that way it could maybe stand on its own and take up less floor space? have to rework expelling mechanism though.
Whats the range of perticulate sizes and shapes the thing copes with? Du you need a industrial granulator or does a simple shredder suffice? How does it hold up with impurities?
Great idea and beautifully executed, my main issue with injection-molding tho is the mold itself being expensive to produce. I was to produce this machine i would sell it at a loss and make a profit from making and selling the molds for it. Its in the molds the money can be made.
Thats not entirely true, injection molding presses can cost much more than the tooling itself. Given the small platen size, the mold itself would basically be two blocks of aluminum to form the cavity and the core side. I build plastic injection/compression molds and have worked in presses for alot of major companies. Sometimes you can make more money off of the press and the components due to things constantly needing maintenance . Such as if you blow a heater wire, burn out a thermocouple, need new ball screws, ect. But it is really sweet to see such a small press for at home use. If youre ever looking for a company to machine new tooling for you @ManuelMaeder contact Franchino Mold and engineering
@@trevormatthews3996 Yes but for a tabletop machine i guess it will be serviced by the owner and i'm not saying that the machine should be cheaper than a single mold but most people would probably buy multiple molds. So by selling the machine for a lower price (not as cheap as a single mold) a person has already invested in the produkt and dus is more likely to buy molds for it. So if you make the machine more accessible more people will buy molds. Now i don't know the exakt price for a single mold of that size maybe you could enlighten me?
Something to also consider, you can 3D print injection molds too. Now you probably never want to try this with FDM (hot plastic in a thermo plastic is probably not a great idea, before layer lines), but there are resin printers out there that have specific engineering grade resins for injection molding. Specifically FormLabs has some high temp resin materials for low-volume runs (I think about 500) that would be perfect for this machine. I haven't done any research if there are other high temp resins for the cheep DLP printers out there, but I imagine that could be the case. Now not only are your low volume molds cheep, you can test molds before having one milled from aluminum.
@Brummibrummibrumm we have been selling to customers who use their MicroMolder for prototyping and low volume production for years. He created his own design based on our machines but neglected to do the proper engineering and has major design flaws in functionally.
Cool project, you should look into making a pelletizer Injection molds are insanely expensive currently and I only need so many egg cups. having plastic pellets means you can use that new pellet extruder by that greenboy guy.
The quality of this machine is outstanding... I would love to see one of the trustworthy youtubers test it in order to give some serious feedbacks... I also hope that you open-source it!
I would absolutely love to buy one of these! I have a dream of producing my own miniature models for RPG games to sell on my website and this machine would make that a reality. The bonus that it helps keep waste plastic out of landfills is extremely exciting. This would be a true game changer for tiny businesses like mine! Happen to have any information to share about how to get on a wait list or procure your machine?
There is not a word in the film about the basic parameters of the injection process. How do you control the charge back pressure, dosing speed and stroke, injection speed and pressure, switching point to pressure hold, mold clamping force, cooling time and mold temperature? Building an injection machine is less than half the way to achieving a repeatable process. The cost of building an injection mold often exceeds the cost of purchasing an injection machine with peripherals.
The most expensive part is a mold, which is produced using high-class processes (grinding, polishing, elecric erosion etc). One mold per one product in this case. Other parts are neither expensive nor complicated.
Putting on my 'constructive criticism' hat for a bit here: while I like the idea, and this looks a lot better than the Precious Plastic designs (although, will this be open-source?), I feel like "low-cost" is a bit of an incomplete statement here - the two parts of a small-scale recycling setup that are typically the expensive ones are the shredder (due to the steel shredding wheels) and the production of the molds (due to the need for accurate machining). The former is not included in this machine (how does mixed waste turn into sorted and shredder flakes without transport?), and the latter is left out of the video. I think this project has a lot of potential, but to function as a true fire-and-forget low-cost local recycling system, there need to be clear answers to these two points - they are the Hard Problems of this problem domain. There are undoubtedly many possible ways to address those issues, but there needs to be _some_ kind of solution for them that still fits within the "local, easy, and low-cost" bracket, and right now it just isn't clear that there is.
Thank you for your thoughts on that and I have to agree with you on most of it. This video had to be limited to 3 minutes and I did not go into these topics. It is not open source yet. Most of my projects related to this machine and the former deisgns are. If you want to have a look at them. I shredded the plastic I collected from friends and family at my university. They had a big shredder there that did a fast job. So the raw material price for me was low and the products created from the machine can be sold at higher prices than granules and be soled to an end consumer. That makes it much faster to reach break-even with this machine while their is not much man labor needed. I wrote about this in my application for the James Dyson Award, if you want to have a look into it. It was just hard to fit all of that in this video. I love the fact you took so much time and thought in this comment, it helps me a lot to find out what is still missing in the project explanation and helps me make a better job:)
@@manutechlab Thanks for the reply :) I'd be interested in reading more in the application, but I can't seem to find a link to it - is it available anywhere?
Believe it or not I searched for a machine like this 5-6 months ago. Do not just focus on recycled plastic. That machine would be awesome for our low volume production. I think this machine can fill a big gap and your timing is perfect.
This is very cool! A larger version big enough to make (building) bricks would be super helpful in African countries that are teeming with plastic waste.
Did you know that there is already an open source injection molding project that aims to create all of this in a way that anyone around the world can build it themselves? It's called Precious Plastic
This really looks cool! I am not shure about the „recyceling“ as it is just a injection molding machine and the parts you produce seem to me more like downcyceling. But the machine is really impressive! Still the parts show obviously the low injection pressure of the system and uneven viscosity of the plastic i. e. too short heating. But if you improve those, you got a money printer there. that could add to fast, cheap prototyping as 3D printers did. Concerning the recyceling, yes shredded bits make sense for cost, but are aweful for process stability, a mess when handeled, harder to control. Thats why pellets are used, even tho they are more expensive then loose shredded bits. May I ask your background? looks to me like you studied mechanical engineering.
Instead of saying that you discovered "many flaws in the design" of your earlier machine you should say the 3D printed prototype allowed you to find enhancements and and efficiencies that you then implemented in the latest version. Your design wasn't flawed, it just wasn't optimized. 🙂
Hi Manuel is amazing what you did. I am working on an other machine will produce mushrooms on low scale. For big scale there are many on market. Can i ask you how you heat up the interior of the flakes? This problem still not have solved as need heat up also an cylinder with water in it. Will be so happy if you can give me a link or idea how made. Thanks so much
Depending on the number of finished parts required, they can be made of aluminum and I think I've even seen inserts 3D printed for molds. With that said, mold making is a whole different field and requires the machines and experience to make the molds as well as learning how to use the molds in the machine.
I have a question: How customizable will the injection molds be? I don't think it'd be that useful for home use if the molds have limited size restrictions and require specialized tooling to customize.
While it is a cool desktop injection molding machine, I fail to see how this helps with plastic recycling ? Isn't the hard part of plastic recycling the sorting necessary, cleaning, and grinding into usable pellets ? Once this is done, you can simply send the grinds to any company that needs plastic in order to make their product. They then will use their already existing injection molding machines for that.
you are spot on, it doesn't address ANYTHING about the recycling process. It's just another DIY injection molding device, a pretty looking one, but not a "recycling" machine at all.
A big thank you to everyone for the feedback :) I am pretty much blown away by the positive response! It really keeps me motivated to push this project! Big big thank you!
I like you.
I own a CNC shop that produces a lot of plastic waste.
I might be very interested in this as an option for our customers.
Would love to learn more.
You're welcome, keep doing amazing things dude!
What a fantastic project! it is both aesthetically good to look at and functions really well!
The price point could be a sticking point as well as getting the molds. Have you thought about the mold supply chain? You need to make the design process and manufacturing process easy for the general public. Perhaps a partnership with Makera that makes the Carvera desktop CNC. That machine would be able to make the molds/dies for your machine.
Alos think about targeting universities and technical collage's as buyers of your product. They could actually teach the whole process from designing the mold/die's through to the finished product.
You need to make one for a 3d printer.
Awesome work!
I would be very interested to see you chiming in or giving advice, if wanted, on this. I want this in my farm to recycle the waste
Thank you so much :) that means a lot to me! :D If you would ever want to see the machine in person, I would love to show it to you :)
You're design looks so damn good I thought it was a commercial product at first
You should contact Stefan from CNC Kitchen. He is a big advocate of plastic recycling and is well known in the 3D printing community. Maybe you can make a video together.
Me?! That's a great idea!
@@CNCKitchen bro spawned in
@@CNCKitchenYour work speaks for itself quite well Stefan! Bravo!
@@CNCKitchen It's a wonderful idea, do it!
Dang, I would love to :) Your video was pretty much the reason I went with a Prusa MK4 instead of a Bambu Lab printer ^^
Hell yeah mate. Use-case aside, building a machine / tool to address a purpose because you couldn't fine one on the market is awesome. Toolmaking is such a cool practice and way less common than it should be.
Thank you! That is right.. only took me about 6 years :D but hey at least I got it mostly done. That is very true
@@manutechlab Time well spent 😂
I agree with this for sure. Find a need, fill a need right?
This is super cool! Precious Plastics has been on my radar for a while now, but one of their weaknesses has always been the injection molding side of things, IMO. This really ups the game!
Hi
The algorithm needs to boost this, more people need to know about this. You have a real chance in changing our ability to recycle plastic.
damn that looks clean. finally a desktop injection molding machine that doesn't look like it'll some how kill you..
Their are lot of commercial desktop injection molding machines that won't kill you.
@@Z-add i didnt say it'll kill you. i said look like. i know theres many desktop machines out there, i own one. but majority of them look very diy or industrial even for a small machine. this design bears a resemblance to the machine micromolder, which i really like the look of.
@APxKP thanks for the shout-out! The esthetics of his enclosure design are noteworthy, but he failed to duplicate our engineering, and the parts that are demonstrated in the video are parts that would be re-ground and processed again due to quality issues.
@@ShopBotix is shopbotix micromolder still being developed
@@Z-add development is done and has been for years. Google micro-molder or Kickstarter Micro-molder.
This was really awesome to see someone work on a great counterpart to the shredders I am seeing pop up here and there.
This is great. A 3D printer and a desktop injection molding machine will make a setup way cooler than having a 3D printer alone.
Hope this project comes to life. I can’t imagine how this will lower the production costs.
I think the answer to "why not change that" is that its much cheaper and more efficient to do it on a large scale. Sort of the reason factories exist. This is super cool though!
That, is pretty awesome. Small scale recycling options definitely need all the help they can get as there are not enough options.
Hello Maeder. I am developing a similar machine to yours using pnematic cylinders and tailored to the Nigerian environment. Good job to your project and good luck in winning the James Dyson Award.
thank you very much and good luck with your machine too :)
If you could extrude the recycled plastic into 3D printer filament, it would be incredibly easy to turn household plastic waste into parts for any application you could think of. It won't have the same strength as the molded parts, but the versatility would be great for home and garage projects. Great job with the incredible recycling concept!
the amount of work u put into it, is stunning
Looks awesome man!
It would be great if there could be some kind of shredder on top. Shredding the plastic to small pieces can be quite difficult without a proper machine.
Is this only for a specific type of plastic like PET or ABS? Or are you able to combine the plastic pieces and create something from a mixture of plastics?
Hi :) thank you very much.. that would be cool indeed. For now I mainly used PP because mixing is not a good idea. PP worked really well so far and is very common in German post-consumer waste
I love the idea. The only issue I see with it is similar to those with traditional injection molding: you need highly specialized molds that are usually quite expensive. Have you ever considered creating a simpler application of this technology, like a 3D filament maker or something along those lines? If so, what made you choose an injection molder?
Congrats on this machine. It looks extremely clean and well-thought-out.
If this was on kickstarter I would have definitely backed!
Thank you, sounds like something I should definitely look into..
@@manutechlab for what it's worth, I think it's great that you're not crowdfunding it just yet. I bet you'll learn a tonne shipping the next ~10-20 units out for testing; having the time to get the machine working well in support of new use-cases, without the pressure of shipping an unfinished product to backers before you're 100% happy with it. Definitely support selling a bunch of "tester" machines to local companies and pricing in "support services" to adapt functionality of the machine as needed though! Love the project.
Amazing! Desktop plastic waste recycling machine can be a game changer!
Keep us updated. Absolutely love your work.
Thank you, I will :)
Seems like a precious plastic project
Excelente trabajo, le deseo el mejor de los éxitos
That machine looks amazing! Looks to be very well engineered as well. 👍
Man I'm grateful for my algo serving this up! Dude this tech is amazing, well done. Imagine this being implemented into kitchen cabinetry one day, even including the plastic shredder. Rather than putting my plastic bottle into the recycling, I clean it up and put it straight into your machine. So cool, well done again.
Awesome work! I appreciate the time and reworking, trying sub assemblies having built many things myself.
Thanks for sharing
Great work. The design is so beautiful….🎉🎉
Great idea for TARS name ^^ definitely looks like him !
I been wanting to build one for years. thanks a ton for the documentation.
Very cool! I want to believe, but the output quality looks a bit spotty. I assume its all limitations on how much extrusion pressure can be applied?
I still have to work on that, thats true. The product is very much usable but the optics I still have to get right. Someone with some experience in injection molding could definitely help, that would be very much appreciated :)
Great job. I see that it is not for sale yet.
wow! really amazing work, thanks for sharing
Molding machine practical ua-cam.com/video/mFJm-YSkk3w/v-deo.html
There appears to be some surface deformation on the parts.
I'm no expert but I would guess the mold is cold or the pressure is insufficient.
Its both.
It is still a work in progress that is for sure :) I have only few experiences with injection molding. But it gets better :)
@ShopBotix I understand this could be competition, but constructive criticism doesn't make you look as petty.
What a beautiful looking machine, I would love to own something like that
What a fantastic idea. Hats off to ya mate.
wow! A truly inspiring project, and an amazing example for small, decentralized solutions.
This machine looks very finished!
I love the idea and i cant wait for a recycling machine that doesnt require me to sell my firstborne to a witch in the woods to be able to afford it!
That looks amazing! I'm following you to see how this will progress.
So awesome! I hope these are available to buy someday! I would definitely get one! Feels like form factor wise my instinct would be to orient it vertically that way it could maybe stand on its own and take up less floor space? have to rework expelling mechanism though.
wait a sec that looks like it works well and its very well designed
This is awesome, is there a change to buy or to download the latest version of the project?
Great idea ...Real Eco solution ...All The Best for YOU
Whats the range of perticulate sizes and shapes the thing copes with? Du you need a industrial granulator or does a simple shredder suffice? How does it hold up with impurities?
Keep up with the great work
Great idea and beautifully executed, my main issue with injection-molding tho is the mold itself being expensive to produce.
I was to produce this machine i would sell it at a loss and make a profit from making and selling the molds for it. Its in the molds the money can be made.
Thats not entirely true, injection molding presses can cost much more than the tooling itself. Given the small platen size, the mold itself would basically be two blocks of aluminum to form the cavity and the core side. I build plastic injection/compression molds and have worked in presses for alot of major companies. Sometimes you can make more money off of the press and the components due to things constantly needing maintenance . Such as if you blow a heater wire, burn out a thermocouple, need new ball screws, ect. But it is really sweet to see such a small press for at home use. If youre ever looking for a company to machine new tooling for you @ManuelMaeder contact Franchino Mold and engineering
@@trevormatthews3996 Yes but for a tabletop machine i guess it will be serviced by the owner and i'm not saying that the machine should be cheaper than a single mold but most people would probably buy multiple molds.
So by selling the machine for a lower price (not as cheap as a single mold) a person has already invested in the produkt and dus is more likely to buy molds for it. So if you make the machine more accessible more people will buy molds.
Now i don't know the exakt price for a single mold of that size maybe you could enlighten me?
Something to also consider, you can 3D print injection molds too.
Now you probably never want to try this with FDM (hot plastic in a thermo plastic is probably not a great idea, before layer lines), but there are resin printers out there that have specific engineering grade resins for injection molding. Specifically FormLabs has some high temp resin materials for low-volume runs (I think about 500) that would be perfect for this machine. I haven't done any research if there are other high temp resins for the cheep DLP printers out there, but I imagine that could be the case. Now not only are your low volume molds cheep, you can test molds before having one milled from aluminum.
Amazing idea! May I ask - how are the molds made and how would a consumer get them?
This far I ordered them from Xometry and designed them myself :)
Very cool technology, hope you will find sponsors, it can partially change plastic problems
Extremely cool project!
this is absolutely bonkers I love it I absolutely love it
So awesome, good luck!!
Very cool. And the mold plates are small enough that it wouldn't cost a fortune to have new plates milled
You had changed the game that for a long time we´ve observed
Very cool Manuel!
Thank you :)!
Would love these to be available as a kit or digital download!
Nicely done!
I think your machine also has huge potential in injection molding prototyping (just as 3d printers were a few years ago) - besides recycling!
@Brummibrummibrumm we have been selling to customers who use their MicroMolder for prototyping and low volume production for years. He created his own design based on our machines but neglected to do the proper engineering and has major design flaws in functionally.
this is awesome and i would love to see more of this machine in action
Cool project, you should look into making a pelletizer Injection molds are insanely expensive currently and I only need so many egg cups. having plastic pellets means you can use that new pellet extruder by that greenboy guy.
The quality of this machine is outstanding... I would love to see one of the trustworthy youtubers test it in order to give some serious feedbacks... I also hope that you open-source it!
Bro you are amazing 😊
I would absolutely love to buy one of these! I have a dream of producing my own miniature models for RPG games to sell on my website and this machine would make that a reality. The bonus that it helps keep waste plastic out of landfills is extremely exciting. This would be a true game changer for tiny businesses like mine! Happen to have any information to share about how to get on a wait list or procure your machine?
There is not a word in the film about the basic parameters of the injection process. How do you control the charge back pressure, dosing speed and stroke, injection speed and pressure, switching point to pressure hold, mold clamping force, cooling time and mold temperature? Building an injection machine is less than half the way to achieving a repeatable process. The cost of building an injection mold often exceeds the cost of purchasing an injection machine with peripherals.
The most expensive part is a mold, which is produced using high-class processes (grinding, polishing, elecric erosion etc). One mold per one product in this case.
Other parts are neither expensive nor complicated.
Very interested how the final product turns out
well done, this looks amazing. fantastically well made 🙂
Great job but the plastic nozzle inside the injection mold needs to be smaller so the plastic is not so melty when the part is ejected.
Great, I love it! Keep up the good work!
Putting on my 'constructive criticism' hat for a bit here: while I like the idea, and this looks a lot better than the Precious Plastic designs (although, will this be open-source?), I feel like "low-cost" is a bit of an incomplete statement here - the two parts of a small-scale recycling setup that are typically the expensive ones are the shredder (due to the steel shredding wheels) and the production of the molds (due to the need for accurate machining). The former is not included in this machine (how does mixed waste turn into sorted and shredder flakes without transport?), and the latter is left out of the video.
I think this project has a lot of potential, but to function as a true fire-and-forget low-cost local recycling system, there need to be clear answers to these two points - they are the Hard Problems of this problem domain. There are undoubtedly many possible ways to address those issues, but there needs to be _some_ kind of solution for them that still fits within the "local, easy, and low-cost" bracket, and right now it just isn't clear that there is.
Thank you for your thoughts on that and I have to agree with you on most of it. This video had to be limited to 3 minutes and I did not go into these topics. It is not open source yet. Most of my projects related to this machine and the former deisgns are. If you want to have a look at them. I shredded the plastic I collected from friends and family at my university. They had a big shredder there that did a fast job. So the raw material price for me was low and the products created from the machine can be sold at higher prices than granules and be soled to an end consumer. That makes it much faster to reach break-even with this machine while their is not much man labor needed. I wrote about this in my application for the James Dyson Award, if you want to have a look into it. It was just hard to fit all of that in this video. I love the fact you took so much time and thought in this comment, it helps me a lot to find out what is still missing in the project explanation and helps me make a better job:)
@@manutechlab Thanks for the reply :) I'd be interested in reading more in the application, but I can't seem to find a link to it - is it available anywhere?
That looks CLEAN. I need one lol
How often does it needs maintenance? Does any of the parts need replacing after so many hours of use?
Awesome, was hoping to do something about plastic bags and bottles. does it work for those?
This would be pretty awesome for the Product Design Course I teach. Keep it up and I hope to see this in person at some events.
DAMN, yes, and yes and yes ! You could touch such a huge market
This is amazing work !
Believe it or not I searched for a machine like this 5-6 months ago. Do not just focus on recycled plastic. That machine would be awesome for our low volume production.
I think this machine can fill a big gap and your timing is perfect.
This is very cool! A larger version big enough to make (building) bricks would be super helpful in African countries that are teeming with plastic waste.
super cool design :)
Thank you Tobi :)
Beautiful machine man, now if we could 3d print the molds ........
Great work!
Yes! This is the future.
awesome machine, please open source the design or sell plans
Looks perfect,
Did you know that there is already an open source injection molding project that aims to create all of this in a way that anyone around the world can build it themselves? It's called Precious Plastic
Yes that project is in fact how I started in 2017. I built their injector but wanted to have a machine that does exactly that automatically :)
This really looks cool! I am not shure about the „recyceling“ as it is just a injection molding machine and the parts you produce seem to me more like downcyceling. But the machine is really impressive! Still the parts show obviously the low injection pressure of the system and uneven viscosity of the plastic i. e. too short heating. But if you improve those, you got a money printer there. that could add to fast, cheap prototyping as 3D printers did.
Concerning the recyceling, yes shredded bits make sense for cost, but are aweful for process stability, a mess when handeled, harder to control. Thats why pellets are used, even tho they are more expensive then loose shredded bits.
May I ask your background? looks to me like you studied mechanical engineering.
Instead of saying that you discovered "many flaws in the design" of your earlier machine you should say the 3D printed prototype allowed you to find enhancements and and efficiencies that you then implemented in the latest version. Your design wasn't flawed, it just wasn't optimized. 🙂
What are the plans regarding the injection molds? How can that be done "low cost"?
Looks like pressure is a bit of a problem, as the plastics is not one uni layer. Or is that your forms that have these?
Hi Manuel is amazing what you did.
I am working on an other machine will produce mushrooms on low scale. For big scale there are many on market. Can i ask you how you heat up the interior of the flakes? This problem still not have solved as need heat up also an cylinder with water in it. Will be so happy if you can give me a link or idea how made. Thanks so much
Do you have any estimate on the speed difference between injection molding on this machine vs 3D printing the same part?
*Saludos.. Excelente trabajo*
*¿Ya está en venta esta maquina inyectora?*
*Bendiciones*
All sounds fine, but if I can't make molds fast and different versions quickly then its not gonna work. It's all bout the molds!!!! 😊
Depending on the number of finished parts required, they can be made of aluminum and I think I've even seen inserts 3D printed for molds. With that said, mold making is a whole different field and requires the machines and experience to make the molds as well as learning how to use the molds in the machine.
Nice work, good luck
T.A.R.S. best bot. See you on the other side Coop’.
So rad!
I have a question: How customizable will the injection molds be? I don't think it'd be that useful for home use if the molds have limited size restrictions and require specialized tooling to customize.
Nice idea.
what you need is discord my friend , extremely interested in building one ! great job!
While it is a cool desktop injection molding machine, I fail to see how this helps with plastic recycling ?
Isn't the hard part of plastic recycling the sorting necessary, cleaning, and grinding into usable pellets ?
Once this is done, you can simply send the grinds to any company that needs plastic in order to make their product. They then will use their already existing injection molding machines for that.
Exactly my thaugts. It's an injection molding machine that processes the recycled plastic but has nothing to do with manufacturing it.
you are spot on, it doesn't address ANYTHING about the recycling process. It's just another DIY injection molding device, a pretty looking one, but not a "recycling" machine at all.
Amazing!