Plastic welding - how it works 

More pure gold. My Patreon membership has 'already paid itself back', several times over. Thanks!

"And should be observed so keenly!"

2:08 That's so interesting, it's like a GMAW (MIG) Torch, but for Plastic!

An awesome end to the Kenya series - well done to all! I think looking into traditional welding methods would be a good investigation to progress this method further. For example: joining two thick workpieces, typically a 'stacked' weld is used ie. a small root weld is run in the bottom of the vee, followed by multiple runs on top - stacked in a pyramid like the pins in ten pin bowling. For the Tee weldment, another idea would be to rebate the verical into the horizontal first, then weld. That way any loads applied to the Tee would be trying to shear the plank material apart rather than just the weld material. All of this testing validation leans towards a very solid university Masters project...

EXCELLENT WORK

Please make more videos on the the flipflopi project and Kenya. It is a beautiful place.

What an amazing technique. I am now going to try to weld together small plastic sheets until I can afford a larger sheet press

You guys are doing a great work. Priceless gift to Mama earth. Good God bless your efforts. We doing our best from Northrift Eldoret

A few tipps: Your running your welds too hot. The Beads only need to bulge slightly of to the side, not melt completely (small Heatgun). For Extrusionwelding (Big Heatgun) try to measure the Air and the Mass. Air should be 260 C, the Mass 230 C coming out of the Nozzle (same for PE and PP). Also try to fill your Grooves to the Top, until the Mass covers a bit of the Surface to both sides of the weld. That way you can be more certain, there are less voids. For the more advanced Users, I also recommend to preheat your Nozzle, (white Teflon part at the Tip) otherwise the start of your Welds could be too cold (Bubbly Surface). Simply "weld" a bit on a Tabletop, that way the Mass does your preheating. And use the proper Nozzle for the Grooves. It should be U-shaped, not V-shaped. Keep up the scraping before welding, thats a very good practice, despite me only doing it for recertification :)

This is really interesting! I took a year of welding at a community college. My hands are too shaky to get a good metal weld due to my essential tremor, although i come to think of it we never did try Plastic Welding... I'll post some other comments on this video, and go discuss on the Discord, but this is really cool. Amazing video as always, keep up the great work!

Great idea 🎉

Thankyou❤

I believe to create a stronger bond, before filling the gaps, to create a grove in between the pieces to be joined, like a lego concept

Dear team. Please could you please share some details for training programs. I would like to join and willing to learn.

So useful! Great video series! Awesome work! 🔥🔥🔥

Great work. I think the heat guns will sell well

So glad that you are healthy again!!!

Good info, many thanks. I'm headed to the Philippines soon and have been dreaming of making a trimaran with HDPE. I've been thinking a one piece mold ideally but these tools can be heaven sent in building up the interior. Idea to consider when molding out the exterior add a 3/4 inch honeycomb shell then add additional thickness after. If accident occurs the honeycomb can help compartmentalize any hole/crack. And for shitz and giggles a passing idea for quick patch repairs to keep afloat I wonder if a Silicon/rubber square/round/any size patch with thousands of tiny octopus suction cups you can place over crack/hole would even stick to HDPE. Things that make you go hummm )

XLnt!

Do you make flat sheets?

So where do I buy the big one you used?

I'd been thinking for a while to try to produce a 3D printing pen that's open source. It could potentially have a bowden extruder to keep the weight out of the operator's hand, but to enable a really powerful extrusion force so you can pump out a lot more filament.

11:55 ME! (Granted i am notorious for having all sorts of project ideas lol). Luckily the heat gun manual / "semi-automatic" method is already "solved" for the most part. One thing i would want is some sort of "Ultimate Open Source Heat Gun" that has precise temperature control, and potentially an air inlet filter (so there is no heater coil fouling, and potentially less debris in the weld, although that latter advantage has way less of an impact i'd imagine). For Smaller Manual Welds things like "Friction Stir Welding", or potentially some sort of Soldering Iron or "3D Pen" Based Setup May be worth a look. These also luckily have existing Open Source Hardware options (Pinecil / TS100) to iterate off of. Making one of those large plastic welding tools would be very interesting! Adapting existing Open Source FDM Filament Extruders/Spoolers may be of use to this as well. Also attaching a "pre-heater" (either a separate dedicated hot air gun, or a duct that splits air between the two) and testing flow rates+temperature for that would be interesting and potentially useful as well. In applications like FlipFlopi it may not make too much sense, but developing semi-automatic processes similar in use to the metal welding world's "Submerged Arc Welding" may be interesting! (Most likely would be more like a GMAW toolhead (the thing described above; the large plastic welder) suspended on a frame or CNC Gantry). Fixed Friction Stir Welding with something like a Drill Press or CNC Router may be interesting as well for applications like this. It would require testing to see if it is of use (and thus if it is even worth pursuing), but i am interested on if oxygen free "shield gas" would be a good idea. Unlike metal welding one could use simple CO2 or Nitrogen for everything. It would be more complex, and again not needed in most applications, but i wonder to what degree the plastic Oxidizes/Burns when it is welded. This is probably the most experimental of my ideas. Cooling with Fans or Compressed Air After the Welder for a quicker cool may lead to better mechanical properties, so that is another experimental thing to look at. That's a whole lot of rambling/ideas, so i'll leave that there. I can discuss it on the discord, and have made OSE Wiki pages on *some of* this stuff already, but yeah. I'd love to hear what others think about all these ideas!

Hi do you have a precious plastic community in Cebu in the phillippines that I can contact

11:31 I don't know what you are already doing/are aware of, so sorry in advance if i overexplain! Anyways there are a couple of ways you could go about testing. You have "Destructive Testing" and "Non-Destructive Testing" (Also the third category of sorts of Feedback with Workers and Final Users of the Boats etc, i'll call this "Real World Testing" i guess) Destructive Testing tends to Yield Some of the Best "Fundamental Data" (Tensile Strength, Compressive Strength, Shear Strength, etc) it does require some test jigs, and sometimes special gear however. Also those numbers can sometimes be difficult to extrapolate to how they will impact the real world results Non-Destructive Testing is the easiest (at least in it's most simple forms). It can yield somewhat lower quality data however as it may be more ambiguous degree of "quality" / perfection rather than some scientific number. It is best used in testing things you want to still use (test models/"beta versions"), or for Quality Control of the ones you are producing for others. The most basic form is a simple "Visual Inspection" ("Dye Penetrant Inspection" may be another good accessible option if you want to get real fancy, although for most applications that may be a bit "overboard"). More complex systems like Ultrasound and Radiography (Think X-Rays, like how they are used for medical, only for non-living things like welds, parts, or even whole machines) are frequently used, but this is VERY "overboard" and may not work as well for plastic (although i will need to dig for data on all that) "Real World" Testing Yields Some of the Highest Quality Data. The Main issue is the Time it takes to acquire it. Also it requires a good communication network that doesn't "naturally form" on it's own. One can get *close* to this data in the short term by doing what is called "Accelerated Aging" testing, although that is a form of destructive testing and thus carries the downsides of that. Short of Time, and potentially reputation (if the results are bad), "Real World" Testing is for the most part Free That's a short introduction to what i know (at least in my non-expert context, i'd love to hear from ACTUAL experts!) about all this. I'll probably discuss this more in the Discord. I also have some OSE Wiki Pages along these lines.

How do you deal with the small plastic scrapings? Since microplastics are already a large problem for the environment how are you preventing those scrapings from making that problem worse? I love the idea of taking waste plastic and reusing it so I don't mean to criticize I'm just curious if that is something that is being considered.