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Secrets to Building a Plastic Injection Molding Machine

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Book Review: Secrets to Building a Plastic Injection Molding Machine
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Do you want to know how to build your own plastic injection molding machine?  If so, then this article will set you on the write path.

Why Build a Plastic Injection Molding Machine?

Creating with plastic can be fun and can be a profitable hobby as well. But most plastic components these days are created by huge, expensive plastic injection molding machines. Molten plastic is forced under enormous pressure into intricate molds.

On the surface it appears to be a technology well beyond the realm of the home shop.

However, the book Secrets to Building a Plastic Injection Molding Machine simplifies this technology making it possible for you to inexpensively injection mold small parts from common recycled plastic.

What is inside the Book?

Secrets to Building a Plastic Injection Molding Machine shows complete step-by-step instructions revealing the secrets of building a small inexpensive tabletop injection molding machine capable of molding up to a half ounce of plastic.

Although a half ounce may not appear to be much plastic, the truth is, that it is more than enough to produce many small useful items.

Best of all you’ll be molding with plastic recycled from milk jugs, soda bottles, plastic oil cans, and more. Your raw materials are free and plentiful. You will learn the basic principles of injection molding and how to design and make your own molds.

You will start by making a simple mold to test the machine. Then you will mold a plastic knob for the machine itself. Next, you’ll progress to a mold that creates a small plastic container with a snap lid.

The Joys of DIY Plastic Injection Molding

Before long you will be creating new products of your own design. You will be able to cast replacements for broken or missing parts, or you can make copies of plastic components. The possibilities are endless.

The moldings are incredibly professional in quality. Your friends will never understand how you were able to do it. Injection molding is a technology that has given us an incredible standard of living. Here are the secrets that will allow you to put this technology to work in your home shop. Build a molder, and explore a whole new technology today.

If you have this machine, and the others in the Gingery build your own metalshop series there really isn’t anything you can’t build.

Basic Machines and How the Work

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Book Review: Basic Machines and How the Work
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Only elementary math skills are needed to follow this instructive manual.

Basic Machines and How the Work covers many familiar machines and their components, including levers, block and tackle, and the inclined plane and wedge, in addition to hydrostatic and hydraulic machines, internal combustion engines, trains, and more. 204 black-and-white illustrations.

This book is a reference guide and instruction manual used to teach military personnel how machines work so that they can make repairs to unfamiliar equipment in the middle of the ocean.

Like the Navy Foundry manual, this book helps teach vital DIY concepts that are vital to repairing material in a long term “grid down” disaster.

In a apocalyptic “Postman” or “Mad Max” world – the ability to understand machinery would make a person a vital asset to a community.  However, I don’t really believe in those scenarios, so I stick with the more realistic view that it is cheaper to know how to fix things than it is to pay someone to fix them.

I found the section on how differentials work to be fascinating, but the book’s descriptions on machines gives a great primer into how things work – by knowing this you can start to see principles and break things down into component parts.  It is books like this that turn a person into a Macgyver.