Boing Boing » ivegotonewordforyouplastics http://boingboing.net Brain candy for Happy Mutants Sat, 25 May 2013 03:26:20 +0000 en-US hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.4.1 On making stovetop bioplastics http://boingboing.net/2010/02/15/on-making-stovetop-b.html http://boingboing.net/2010/02/15/on-making-stovetop-b.html#comments Mon, 15 Feb 2010 00:35:01 +0000 Cory Doctorow
Overall making bioplastic at home was a fun activity. It had a certain magical, "oh my, I made plastic" quality …]]>
Overall making bioplastic at home was a fun activity. It had a certain magical, "oh my, I made plastic" quality to it. Bioplastic in thin sheet form does seem to be a fun and practical application as a build material. However right now the results, as far as I have found with molds, are not promising enough for one to be able to use it to make your own things or to produce plastic for your DIY projects. I need to qualify this by saying that any of the problems with the bioplastic could of course be my fault for not cooking it long enough, cooking it too high/low, measuring out the proportions incorrectly, using the wrong starch,drying the bioplastic in too hot/too humid/too dry a room etc.

Taking that into account, at the moment shrinkage, warping and the long drying times, as I have found them, make it unpractical. As for using it as a 3D printing material, I am not comfortable enough with this material at the moment to even properly test it in a 3D printer. The "gunky" quality and long drying times seem to currently make it impractical for use as a 3D printing material. Someone could possibly tweak the recipe and make it more practical both for 3D printing and molding and I hope this happens. Perhaps you could with some careful experimentation be the one to make bioplastic a practical reality for molding and 3d printing? Cooking & molding bioplastics at home: recipes, results & tips

Previously:
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