machinery

4 Articles

DIY Injection Molder Built From A Cheap Pneumatic Press

March 6, 2022 by 10 Comments

[Kurt Schaefer] was watching YouTube videos of people making molds for injection molding purposes using what he considered to be the toy 3018 CNC machines, and looking at the results, decided he needed a piece of the action. However, once you have molds, the next obvious issue to address is lack of access to an injection molding machine. But these things are expensive. As luck would have it, you can get a nice-looking pneumatic press for less than $350, and with a little more money spent, [Kurt] found he could convert it into a functional injection molding machine (video, embedded below), and get some half-decent results out of it.

After ordering the press on eBay, what eventually arrived was quite a mess, having clearly been inadequately packed for its weight, and had sustained some damage in transit. Despite this, it seemed the functional bits were fine, so [Kurt] decided to press on with the build. The first obvious change is the requirement of a heated chamber to deal with the feedstock material. Using an off-the-shelf injection molding chamber by buster beagle 3D, only a few standoffs and a support bracket needed machining in order to complete the mechanics. A common PID controller available from the usual suppliers, with some heat bands wrapped around the chamber, dealt with the injection temperature requirements, and some 3D printed enclosures wrapped it all up neatly.

After some initial wobbles, and a couple of hacks to the design, [Kurt] got some pretty good results out of this simple setup, and it appears to be pretty tune-able and repeatable, which will help maintain the quality of those results. In short, a neat hack of easy to get parts, and perhaps a welcome addition to a hackerspace near you?

3D printed parts are available on the Thingiverse page, as well as a Fusion360 CAD model. The shopping list for parts can be found in the video description, if you want to have a go at reproducing this.

We’ve seen a few DIY injection molding attempts over the years, like this slick plastic molding setup. Here’s one with 3D-printed molds, and if you just need something the right shape, you could just injection mold with a hot glue.

Continue reading “DIY Injection Molder Built From A Cheap Pneumatic Press” →

Making Tea Pots With Antique Machinery

September 23, 2021 by 30 Comments

We in the West take quite a lot for granted. We’re used to certain standards of care in our homes and our places of work, so much so that we rarely even take time to notice it. Workplace accidents are a big deal, and failing to report can lead to you finding yourself being shown the door. So it’s a little sobering to see how things get made in countries with a less stringent approach in certain areas of basic health and safety.

With the urge to drive prices to the lowest possible, low-tech items such as clothing and housewares tend not to be made in highly sophisticated, automated factories, but more likely in smaller facilities employing more labour, which favours countries where such labour is cheaper and more available. The video we’re highlighting here shows a small factory in what is likely Pakistan (but equally could be a few other places, we’re only guessing) which would seem fairly typical for the level of sophistication required to make enameled teapots.

The video shows the production process, starting from sheet steel cut by hand with shears, which is trued before being stamped into a shallow dish. These first two machines are driven by exposed belts, which is particularly risky, given the style of free-flowing fabric clothes several of the workers wear. In the background you can see electrical wiring just slung around, hanging off nails. The whole building is the same, improvised machines with no protective features, managed by skilled manual workers dedicated to their allocated task, all working in perfect unison. It’s lovely to watch, but also saddening at the same time, as you know those guys are right in the middle of a thousand potential hazards, and only their skill and dexterity is stopping something bad happening. The machines themselves are heavily worn all over the place, but clearly hacked by someone there knows enough to just keep them ticking over. Just checkout the deep wear in the tool rest at [4:20] in the video!

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A Plastic Injection Machine You Can Use At Home

July 7, 2021 by 25 Comments

3D printing is all well and good if you want one of something, but if you want lots of plastic parts that are all largely identical, you should consider injection molding. You can pay someone to do this for you, or, in true hacker fashion, you can build an entire injection molding setup in your own garage, as [Action BOX] did.

The build relies on a pair of beefy 3hp motors to drive the screw-based injection system. These are responsible for feeding plastic pellets from a hopper and then melting them and filling the injection reservoir, before then forcing the hot plastic into the mold. Further stepper motors handle clamping the mold and then releasing it and ejecting the finished part. A Raspberry Pi handles the operation of the machine, and is configured with a custom Python program that is capable of proper cycle operation. At its peak, the machine can produce up to 4 parts per minute.

It’s an impressive piece of industrial-type hardware. If you want to produce a lot of plastic things in your own facility, a machine like this is very much the way to go. It’s not the first machine of its type we’ve seen, either! Video after the break.  Continue reading “A Plastic Injection Machine You Can Use At Home” →

Using Machinery To Make Factory-Fresh Industrial Music

September 11, 2019 by 5 Comments

Many machines make music as a side effect, as anyone who owns a 3D printer can confirm. [工場音楽レーベルINDUSTRIAL JP] is working on a project to meld music and machinery in new ways. They are building a record label and a playlist based on the sights and sounds of small factories in Japan. Their videos combine the hypnotizing, rhythmic beauty of precision manufacturing process with music from local artists, and the result is like r/SoundsLikeMusic met up with How It’s Made and created a series of un-narrated industrial fever dreams.

While the focus is on high-tech factories, the content of these moodily-lit videos is pretty diverse. Never before have we been so mesmerized by the folds of an air filter or the pressing of vinyl records. Our favorite might be GOKO BANE, which takes a bumpin’ look around the Goko Spring factory. It makes us want to throw on some rags and dance like they do down in Zion.

Once in a while they will play around with the video speed of the factory process for effect, and it works nicely. If there’s any downside, it’s that no one process is shown from start to finish. But that’s not the point, anyway.

Don’t have access to a factory? Us either. But if you can get stepper motors, it’s pretty easy to make music by driving them forward, or even backward.

Thanks for the tip, [KILLERGEEK].