How to make a stool seat from PET covers and other plastic

If you are passionate about carpentry, you can make something quite beautiful and comfortable at home. furniture. However, without having a bright talent for this, all projects turn out to be standard ones of the same type. To make something truly original, you can use unusual materials. An example of such integration is the production of a stool with a seat from recycled plastic waste.

Materials:

• HDPE plastic (caps from PET bottles, canisters, bottles from household chemicals);
  
• wooden beam;
  
• wood glue;
  
• countersunk screws;
  
• plywood;
  
• chipboard;
  
• self-tapping screws;
  
• dye.

Stool making process

To make a seat, you must first assemble a mold for pressing the seat. Plywood is used for this. The form consists of 2 boxes, one of which fits closely into the second. To ensure smoothness, their internal surfaces must be covered with laminated chipboard.


Next, you need to prepare the plastic for recycling. Canisters and bottles are cut into small strips. Then they are mixed with caps from PET bottles.

The resulting mass is divided into portions and melted in the oven on one baking sheet.

When the plastic becomes pliable, it is lumped together and left in the oven on a second baking sheet. Thus, all portions are melted one by one and collected into one lump. Naturally, you need to work with thick gloves.
The plastic mass is mixed by hand according to the principle of working with dough or caramel, but not too much, so as not to mix all the colors into one. Then it is placed into a mold and compressed. This requires serious effort, so it is advisable to use a press.


While the plastic is cooling, you need to make the frame of the chair. If it is a stool, then a timber is used.



To keep everything as neat as possible, it is better to glue the parts together without using fasteners. The assembled frame is polished to perfection.



The compressed blank of a seat made of cooled plastic is removed from the mold and refined with woodworking equipment. It needs to be planed, preferably on a surface planer, then trimmed and the edges milled. All the resulting shavings are collected and can be used again to make other seats.



Next, the stool frame is painted in the required color. When the paint dries, the seat is screwed to it. The plastic does not hold the fasteners well, so the seat must be drilled through and use countersunk screws.



Having collected a sufficient number of plastic lids and canisters, you can assemble a whole kitchen set of 4 stools and a table. The production of such furniture is a promising business idea, but to implement it, it is necessary to refine the technology for melting plastic, since it takes a long time to do it in such volumes using an oven.

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