A small scale recycling project based off of Precious Plastics. The idea of this project was to create machines that could recycle plastic on a local scale for our makerspace BTU Lab
The first machine we build was the shredder. The biggest challenge in this was to have to convert the Metric measurements in the blueprints provided to us into Imperial units. We had to adjust the overall dimensions of the shredder to accomodate to this, as it would have proved difficult to get metal sheets in Metric measurements. We also had a terrible time trying to find a good motor. We needed a low rpm, high torque motor that would run off of 110 volts.
This machine was a bit easier to build since we weren't going directly off another set of blue prints. We decided to use their blueprints as inspiration for ours. We sourced an older oven that we tore apart. The main components we needed were the heating elements and the oven enclosure. We removed the stove ranges and temperature controls that came with the oven. We used an Arduino to build our own temperature control system. You can find the repo for this project here. We then fabricated an adjustable shelf inside of the oven to put our mold inside of. We would use this to adjust for different sized molds. We also added a bottle jack to the bottom of this as our compression mechanism.
