Support this channel on Patreon: www.patreon.com/8BitGuy1 Visit my website: www.the8bitguy.com In this episode, I explore several new methods of restoring old, yellowed plastics back to their original color and beauty!
Hey man I hope you see this but I think I have a very easy solution to scaling the heat treatment one. I use a sous vide machine for work. simple little thing, you plug it in, submerge it in water and set the temp. and it will heat and circulate the liquid. for the container go to a restaurant supply place and grab a "lexan container" they make em all the way up to 18"x26"x12" which should hold just about anything you could want to do. the container should be around $40 and a basic sous vide should be around $100 I hope this helps and I hope you see this!!!
ozone gas is fairly unstable, I don't imagine there was much ozone left after 4 hours. This technique may require leaving the generator hooked up and running. A plus side of this is it'd be easy to use a large clear garbage ecycling bag and just tape it to the hose. The output of the generator would offset any small leakage
A very obvious advantage that the ozone method has is that you maybe don’t have to disassemble the item to isolate the plastic parts, because you’re immersing it in a gas, not a liquid.
What I like about the ozone method is that in some cases you wouldn't need to disassemble the gadget, which is good because sometimes it is risky and one might break it.
For people with a 3d printer: putting it on the heated bed heated up to 60C this works as well. You could even make a little gcode and move the container back and forth from time to time and then some UV LEDs on top
Instead of rigging hot water heater parts with a thermostat, just use a suit vide cooker(immersion circulator). Not only will it heat the liquid to an exact temperature, but it will also circulate the liquid around in the tub.
@The 8-Bit Guy Ok, tried this on a translucent plastic, buttons that were yellowed on an old Copy Machine, and I used the Hydrogen Peroxide + UV method. First, I tried a UV light (black light) and after leaving it there for 8 hours, I did not see any improvement, but rather the entire thing (on all of the buttons) appeared to be beginning to yellow (even where they had been like new). I hoped that this had been because of the lack of heat, so I moved it to the sunshine for 4 hours (here in Tucson, Arizona in 106ºF heat). This noticeably yellowed all the plastic parts! I pulled them out of the UV light. Then I heated up a pot of water on the stove until I found the 160ºF sweet spot on my stovetop's Melt setting. Then I poured out the water and replaced it with Hydrogen Peroxide. When it reached 160ºF I placed my plastic buttons into the pot. I felt like I saw some mild improvements after about 5 hours or so, and I removed the pieces, feeling like the next step was to try the Salon Care solution. But after an hour of being dried, and cooling down, my plastic parts had thrown me another curve ball! Wherever there had been yellowing on the translucent plastic, it was now non-translucent white! This is a nightmare!!!!! A NIGHTMARE!!! I realized then that none of these retrobrighting videos had been done with translucent plastic (that I knew of at least). I raised the white flag and said, "enough is enough, I'm putting this copier back together and selling it as it is." Only one problem, when I put the buttons back into the control panel, THEY HAD SHRUNK!!!! Massive shrinkage! For every Inch of original length, I lost one millimeter!!!! After hours (literally hours) of jerry-rigging, cutting, gluing, and literally praying, I have a working copy machine again! This was a $17,000 copier, now still worth thousands. And I almost ruined it... the replacement panel (they don't sell buttons separately) is $1,200, and there isn't really a second hand parts market for these. BE CAREFUL. This plastic was from around 2009, and had yellowing from sunlight exposure. DON'T TRY THIS ON TRANSLUCENT PLASTICS!!!
