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Park bench and outdoor tiles
- This topic has 8 replies, 3 voices, and was last updated 2 years ago by
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Hello, I’m Martin, from Croatia. What type of plastic would be best for a park bench or outdoor tiles? And is it practical or even possible to melt plastic with a grill toaster?
Hi Martin,
I’m not sure on the type you would need for outdoors but if you know more let me know.
In terms of using your grill toaster, I would take as many precautions as possible, you are dealing with various polymers here and they produce volatile gases when heated at certain temperatures. The PP guys are starting to look into this as they mentioned in their monthly update video, so be careful out there! Plus I would look into the different plastics and their characteristics (i.e. what temperature they melt at, burn at etc.). PP have all of that in their starter pack.
If the answer to the durability question is to use LDPE plastic then I would recommend you have a look at this guy who tested plastic in this home with grill toaster. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Q19Yxscy0U
Hope this helps. Keep marching on!
Not sure what type of grill you are planning to use. You may have seen this post http://onearmy.world/community/forums/topic/sunbed-from-beach-trash/ .
For whatever grill you try, make sure you understand how the temperature is controlled. The griddle type of grill in this video, often has a loosely coupled temperature sensor on the edge of the plate. What the actual heated plate temperature is a guess. I would get one of the cheap IR thermometers so you can get a better idea. What ever you do, do it outdoors, if there is no breeze, use a fan to blow the fumes away from you (or use the correct mask). You are likely to overheat some of the plastic and bad fumes will be present.
Thanks guys, I will try to take all the necessary precautions you mentioned! I would also like to know if I could use this method for any type of plastic, I’m guessing PET is out of the question, since it has a high melting temperature. @s2019 it’s this type of toaster https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Q19Yxscy0U.
@cmar that one may have better temperature control than the open face griddle type that is used in the video I posted. One option for better temperature control may be to use one of the PID/SSR/Thermocouple bundles that are so cheap online and drill/tap a hole for the TC in a good place.
HDPE is probably a good staring point. If you design a bench, take into account its properties. Also it may be difficult to process enough plastic on one of those grills and you may need to build a custom hot press.
If you look at cartridge heaters sometimes called mold heaters, a common size is 9.5x80mm and 300w. On ebay you can find them for a very low cost. You can then build your mold (aluminum) and just plan to drill a few holes for them. Control them with the typical PID/SSR/TC. Not sure what the advantage of the induction heating would be.
Wow, that is a lot of plastic. If that bench is about 2m long, solid that would be about 300Kg. Do you expect this to be mixed plastic? Did you see some of the posts on roof tiles and pavers being cast out of mixed plastic? They were working with a fairly large scale machine.
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