fluid tube from plastic bottle

I threw away my 3d printer a few months ago and donated it to some crazy helicopter bike makers who can make better use of it. Why?
Because I don\'t think it should be part of my technical process at all.
Because once I started making plastic parts by cutting, folding and welding high density polyethylene plastic, I decided that the process was better than 3d printing (
I\'m talking about extrusion printers like MakerBot, not high-end industrial printers)
In all possible ways
This Instructable is the simplest and most useful element to build this system, the tube of the triangle.
With this technology in hand, you can create water and gas dense pipes in a wide range very quickly, with arbitrary shapes and can be edited as needed, all garbage is free.
The tools and components needed for this are: high density polyethylene liquid bottles like milk, and some juice and bottled water
Not Sharp)
Candles and lighters or matches can score as sharply as forka\'s straight edge, such as the ruler finding a bottle, just like the bottle in the picture that stores milk.
What you want is milk white plastic, recycling symbol \"2 \".
According to the geometry of the bottle, the largest flat part is cut out, which can be done with scissors, knives or box cutters or razor blades. Wash it!
A warning here is if you are harvesting from a bottle of milk or juice (
Especially milk)
, When you finish the bottle, do it well, don\'t put it on a pile of things to deal with, it will stink.
Just develop this habit, and every time you finish a bottle of milk, you slice the flat part out, throw the rest out of the recycling plant, clean your Plastic Raw Material, dry it, somewhere.
The mode is as shown below, you only need to select the size required by the application.
I would say that with some work you can do anything for the side length of the cross-section triangle, from quarterly inches to inches and a half.
Here one size of your rectangle is 3 times the length of the side and the other is the length of the finished tube.
The dotted line indicates folding, the folding in the middle is one-way, and the weld label is two-way, as described in the image.
Score the folding line with a fork or other sharp things and straight edges, such as a ruler or some PP plastic food housing waste, and cut the whole thing off with scissors.
When you learn to bend deeper or harder with pliers or something, it involves a bit of fiddling.
One of the great benefits of making things this way with high density polyethylene is that many times you don\'t even need to weld, you can cut, fold, bend with scissors, knives and pliers, make a lot of useful things.
This kind of thing works even at room temperature.
The properties of this welded joint are similar to those used in food technologies such as calzone or jiaozi.
Bread dough is not much different from the state of high density polyethylene, if you do this correctly, the finished joint looks very much like the joint in these different breads
Weld after cooking.
Light candles.
Keep the joint on top and side of the flame, push the joint together with your fingers or pliers, and wave to heat.
If plastic smokes or turns black or catches fire, you are too hot.
What you want to see is the glass transition, which looks like: At this point, high density polyethylene actually looks like glass and works like a molten glass.
It becomes clear!
Be careful not to let more plastic go through the glass shift as it will disrupt your shape.
This will always happen, in my experience, and you just need a little bit of control.
When both sides are glass-like, gently break them together with tweezers, and repeat everything up and down the joint, let it cool, check, fix the hole, repeat, until there is a continuous welded joint throughout the length.
This pipe should be water tight if it is done correctly!
You can test it with it as a straw.
If it works like a straw, it means there are no holes.
If there\'s a hole, fix it!
Can you use a desktop consumer 3d printer to do water tight tube?
This may be the case, but it often fails and needs to be fiddled to really keep water or air.
In my experience, anything that uses a commercial desktop printer in a place where you really want to not leak is a very bad idea.
If it doesn\'t leak this time, it will leak next time and then you won\'t expect it.
Another key point here is that in addition to using my own high density polyethylene bottles for free, these bottles are regulated by the FDA, and the plastic wire shaft you get from 3d printer company is not.
So when you make a fluid system with your own milk or juice bottle, you also have the full regulatory power of the FDA to support the safety of your system.
How hard is this design?
When you build the part, you can \"design\" it, just follow the needs of the eyes.
It\'s like the desktop 3d printer did when working on parts using an outsourced machine store, changing your part cycle time: it\'s huge.
The basic thing I might want can be made with a knife and a lighter instead of being forced to use a computer with CAD model software to make the simplest rectangular element.
3d printing is made for the rich.
If you go to a large chain home improvement store, one of the most expensive ways to buy plastic is to buy a wire shaft for a 3d printer filament.
Buying a whole plastic recliner or picnic table will cost you several orders of magnitude less per liter of plastic.
But what if you have designed everything in 3d CAD?
So, is the 3d printer certainly good for prototyping?
Well, if you are using a very expensive CAD software, it can still be designed with it, and since it is very simple, it can be much easier to do it.
Just make parts for triangle tubes in CAD software and then scale, move, rotate, copy and paste as needed to make a lot of parts, if needed, all of this can carry liquid and gas in a sealed passage.
You can also prototype with paper.
Fold the paper, maybe tape it to see how it looks, and if you like, use the paper as a template for the plastic, track it with a marker pen.