Weekly Update

This week, there were a lot of tedious fights in making progress on the injection machine.

Injection Mold Machine

This week I hooked up the wiring and worked on attaching the plunger. The wiring was easier than I remembered; I only encountered one major problem. Because I had two PID controllers controlling the 4 barrel heaters, I tried to use my power supply to distribute the power to the two controllers, instead of having them wired to each other directly. For some reason, the power supply did not work; maybe some sawdust ended up in it. I was worried at first that it was one of the PIDs that wasn’t working; luckily, I checked the connection in a different way. Because they did end up working.

I still haven’t tested the Injection machine, other than turning it on and making sure it heated up, because I wanted to make sure the plunger was functional first. Getting the plunger attached was a lot of work, because I needed to drill a hole in the metal round bar that I could put a bolt through, to secure the plunger to the handlebar press. The process of making one small hole required tons of dull drill bits, two drills, several recharged batteries, and lots of cooling down time, but I eventually got it before my week ended.

Here you can see all the wiring and the plunger in use.

Concrete Pots

Not much progress was made with the concrete pots. The 3d printer is working flawlessly, so I printed all the parts and assembled the mold.