PLA Packing Peanuts
Description
Please go ahead and make larger sizes too. :)
Until sensible packaging that's biodegradable or easy to recycle becomes more widespread, in a pinch you can fill out any gaps around packages you have for postage with these little cylinders.
On output, they seem to be reasonably stiff, easily springing 1mm or so in diameter with a strong squeeze, and breakable at a few millimetres. They could be used to replace expanded polystyrene 'packing peanuts', whereever scrunched-up paper is too squishy.
It might be a good idea to cut a small amount of the material out of the model to reduce stiffness even more.
The cylinder included is 15mm long, with an ideal Inner Diameter of 9.5mm and OD 10mm, the resulting effect being that a 0.5mm extruder nozzle will draw a circle one-line-wide on each layer, which should shrink to be a loose fit around M8 bar/studding.
This gives the part three simple purposes:
1. Biodegradable packaging
2. Circular print test/calibration
3. Spacers and/or protective sleeves for M8 fastenings
Instructions
(I tried exporting an STL with a pattern of parts to slice up, but skeinforge took about as long over slicing the first layer as it did to create the entire equivalent gcode for a single cylinder multiplied within the program; must be something to do with how SF approaches the problem)
A sheet of 64 (8 by 8 closely spaced) took about 1h15m to print with 20mm/s perimeter lines and 60mm/s moves.
I also found that my old Adrian's Geared Extruder began to lose grip on the filament by the end of the print, giving me a good reason to try and add a cooling fan to it or build a new version of Wade's extruder.
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I'm not even sure that PLA has that great environmental credentials... from wikipedia - "It can biodegrade under certain conditions, such as the presence of oxygen, and is difficult to recycle." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P...
In a compost heap to the ASTM standard D5338, PLA and PCL will biodegrade 100% within 60 days, and there are a couple of studies you can find online that show how a lazily-built compost heap will degrade them almost completely over 30 days, for instance: http://www.nt.ntnu.no/users/sk...
As for what would happen if you were to entrust solid pieces of PLA to the current rubbish collection of most nations, I can only speculate that it might spend several months degrading in a landfill, with the lower availability of bacteria there.
So if you break something made of PLA, smash it up
and chuck it into a nearby compost heap if you want utmost peace of mind that seagulls won't eat it. :)
Would the energy required to run the printer while producing these not render them an ecological disaster?
Pretty much an efficiency disaster, such a thing ought really to be produced at high volume by a shaped extruder and chopped up into segments, hence the first line in the description.
Whether there is an ecological disaster depends on how you generate the electricity to run your machine.
12V Battery, + Solar panel = zero mains printer?
OK, I'll shut up now! =-X
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You can buy biodegradeable packing peanuts. I had a massive bag of them. (5 foot tall!) down to about a foot now. In water, they go sticky, and eventually dissolve.
Seen a few of them, some kind of starchy things, mind the simplest way to do it is just to make popcorn.