PLA Recycling Coaster Transcript

PLA RECYCLING: Coaster!

A transcript

William: "Hello Makers! For today's Makercraft Live! project I made a simple coaster out of slumped PLA scrap! Unfortunately, today's project may not be one you can do at home unless you own a 3d printer and print a lot! 

To follow along at home, you will need: 
-PLA filament or scraps- Make sure all of your plastic is PLA
-An oven you have no intention of eating out of. I bought this one just for hobbies
-A pair of scissors to cut plastics to size
-Protection: Oven Mitts and a ventilator

Wither the scraps come from failed 3d prints or adhesion and supports which help successful ones, if you 3d print for very long you'll find yourself with lots of this scrap material laying around. We will begin by using scissors to cut our material down to size. Cut down to whatever size and shape you want to show up in your final product.

Once we have them cut to size, we can begin to put them in our oven safe containers. Here I have a silicone mold I made earlier as well as a pan I'm not going to use for anything else.

Go ahead and pop them in the oven. I have the oven set to 370 degrees Fahrenheit.

My oven is outside. I have a cheap toaster oven I use for polymer clays and for things like this. This should probably be done in an outdoor hobby style oven you don't use for food.
This may be another factor stopping you from doing this at home.

PLA emits mostly non-hazardous gasses when it is melted, but you should be always be thinking of stuff like that.

Be careful not to burn yourself.

You should be looking to check on them every once in a while to make sure its not smoking or burning.
And you should be looking for your surface to be pretty well melted and slumped.

So here are my results! I have not done this before. My Mold worked alright, though the PLA didn't puddle out as much as I wanted. I also ended up with this sort of sheet of plastic. I think it all looks pretty cool.

So I'm gonna cut a coaster out of this material here.
I will draw a circle on it to cut it out
And I will be cutting it out on a scroll saw.

Be sure to be wearing safety equipment, especially a ventilator, before you do anything like this.

Here it is, freshly cut and then I took it over to the belt sander and sanded it up a little bit
and here is what it looks like a little more sanded.

Now lets go ahead and see if the coaster works...

It works!

I hope you all have a nice day
be sure to check out our facebook for updates and videos and stay creative!"

-William

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