 Welcome to Monday news number 28, kind of exciting month because we're going to start product design. So in the last months we have been working on building machines, a lot of new machines. And Jan actually made a nice little recap about where we are with the machines in the workspace. So working on the engineering side of it. And then later how we're going to use them to make products. So Jan. Hello, my name is Jan and the last seven months were mainly focused on machine experimenting and building. And so I will present you some of our work here in the workspace. So you can see our shredder development when we work in parallel and two strategy. So single shaft against double shaft. We still have to work on our quality at the moment because the granulates are too big, but the productivity is there. The extrusion machine that we have here is a beefy prototype that we use to run some tests in order to design the final version as good as possible. But as you can see, we can already obtain some good quality beams. So the sheet press system is a complete setup that allows us to build 120 by 120 meter sheets and which is constituted by one big oven and one big press. So now we are more focused on material testing for the beams, for example. We will try to partner with laboratories to get better data on their resistance. We are now working on how to process sheets and you can cut, bend, glue, or even CNC cutting. All these techniques will be properly documented in how to videos. We also run some tests on CNC to be able to offer a good guide on injection mold design and building. That allows us to create various objects that we have then to test to ensure the applications. So that's what we've been up to in the last seven months. And now Vicente, we talk to you more about product design. Thank you Jan. My name is Vicente and I'm going to talk about product design. Precious plastic, it's been mainly focused on developing machines to create alternative to recycled plastic and so far it's been the community who has taken the lead into designing products and conceptualizing and making them real. All sorts of bowls, household items, a lot of decorative tiles in the bazaar. We've seen trays as well, small little functional objects like surf pins and even gelery. So one of the things that all these products have in common is that they are all crafty and handmade. For version 4 we want to contribute more in product design to the community. And one of the focuses is to make bigger products and also really precise molds in order to challenge what is the perception of recycled plastic and what it's capable of. On the other hand we also want to make like rough products but really functional that creates alternatives for developing countries for instance in the construction area. One of the examples of bigger products that we are working on is a modular structure that Adam has been working for a couple of months. He's going to introduce you deeper. Yes, yes, yes. I developed this joinery during the design process. The main point was the modularity and the structural strength. What do you think are the good points of this joinery in particular? The good point is the modularity because it's really easy to set up and after you produce the whole part really fast to build it, the construct. If you have a clear idea what you want to do, for example a greenhouse or a small house. It's really strong, the whole joinery point, right? Yes, absolutely. We tried to sit on it on the top and it was in a strong so we were really happy because we realized the recycled plastic after injection can be really strong. For example, build like this structure. One of the bigger achievements of version 4 is that we developed a sheet press system in which we are able to make recycled plastic sheets and Jason is going to talk more about it right now. So far we've made sheets at 6mm and 12mm. We've used polystyrene, HDPE and polypropylene. So there are different types of materials of different qualities. With polystyrene you get a very strong but brittle sheet but it has a really nice smooth surface. With HDPE and PP you get a slightly more flexible but stronger sheet. It has a slightly rough surface but that can be polished after. The sheets we're making are 120 by 120 which is half of the industry standard which means they can be easily integrated into pre-established manufacturing processes. One of the exciting applications I see for the sheets is furniture design especially using CNC machines which are becoming more available across the world. But we also have been improving our extruder and now with a bigger motor we're trying to test the limits of what is coupled off and Tim has been testing and he can show you right now what he's been doing. Yeah, so with the bigger extruder we're able to make bigger beams and fill larger molds. Some of the things we've been testing have been making solid rough bricks extruding larger flower pots, bigger molds and going even bigger making skateboards. So along with these molds we've been exploring the way that plastic flows through traditional beams and have found a way to create angular beams which could lessen the amount of joinery needed make stronger corners. With a new flat nozzle thanks to the help of Zeleniu we've been able to extrude hollow beams, hollow tubes which is a big development I think, a lot of potential in this. So after seven months of machine development and material research we are ready to start the product design phase. If you've been inspired for what you've seen in this video please let us know in the comment below and if you're a product designer and you want to help please join us at next.preciousplastic.com because we are opening a few positions for product design in-house but if you want to contribute remotely please check the link below in which we are going to document all the process during the following weeks using one of the powerful tools in the community which is the forums. Okay so I want to talk a bit more about forums and it's a bit of a lengthy video this part but it's a problem that occurs here and I think it is a big part of this project as well and I think it's maybe interesting to share or I think it's useful to share because it's stuff we have to deal with on a daily basis but you guys are not aware of. So online forums are super crucial for our project because it's a place where people share knowledge, ideas, feedback tips it's really where the community from around the world comes together but having an online community also comes with quite some problems so spam is one of those things people just throw messages on there another one is just having the platform it can be very slow you might miss functionalities or it's just buggy and that's something we're actually improving now by building one army this new platform that would help and make that all much better but there are also some problems that I just don't know how to deal with it I don't know and that's actually what I want to talk about today because here we work with 40 people from around the world in one building and we spend a lot of time just making the place nice making sure people are not fighting, we're on the same page but online everyone just comes together and you hope it's going to be okay and sometimes it doesn't, it just doesn't click and I have one of those examples right here to talk to you about and his name is Gunther and he's probably one of our most active members in a positive and a negative way see he says a lot of things about the project in the forums for instance you're not creating an army, you're only enriching yourself or you're building this monolith pyramid structures with this organization it's such a waste of public money I mean we won an award, we never really used public money so he says a lot of things that are factually just not really right or we disagree with so we often reply for instance here's a super long post from Katrina who's part of the team who actually went every point in depth to explain what we're stand for and why we're doing this and then you get messages back like at the end there's a profit driven private enterprise which were not for actually foundation no transparency, I think we're quite transparent we share everything what we do open source or free and no real community based decisions which I think is the opposite we do everything here in community in this building together and then there are also just things he doesn't like for instance the way how we get money is from Patreon people supporting or bazaar or people donating money and so he says it's not like a good thing it's simply wrong but then he does make a donation which is super nice actually the moment he starts complaining a lot on the forums you also see people replying to that and the answer is often like hey if you don't like it if you don't like the bazaar maybe start your own website or your own marketplace and that's we encourage people always to do that that we build something but it's not perfect you can help us out improving it or build your own thing but then his answers are sometimes a bit rough like sorry but you must be retarded greedy, incompetent, arrogant or just one of those pretentious spoiled hippies I mean that's quite a rough answer to other members people get upset about that it just doesn't create a nice digital environment so we end up often deleting an account because it's too rough but he just creates a new account, comes back shares a lot of feedback again, infiltrates the forum and actually I also think he personally just doesn't like me I think I should be in jail the weird part is that on the one hand he's super negative and he hates everything we do from the little things but also the organizational structure but I think he's also just one of our most contributive members he's super active so he's also very helpful in the forum helping people to find their place giving them tips and suggestions he makes machines, super high-end quality proper machines actually and he sells them in our bazaar which he actually doesn't like but I think he does all this stuff like he really pushes pressure plastic forward in a way as well he has very good feedbacks there he's also contributing github so helping out coding this new platform so I would say I really respect this guy as well for all the energy he puts into this project I mean there's not many people around the world that put so much care into it so I had a Skype with him to see like I don't know who is this guy, what is up turned out to be quite a nice guy but I was like why are you so rough and he was like yeah yeah sometimes I'm just a bit passionate I invited him actually to come to our workspace here and ain't over to help us out but I think that's also the tricky point he just has a different way of working than us and I think that's actually one of the challenges we're right now how do we create this harmony online a nice place to be everyone can openly share what they think and contribute to the project so if you have any tips or suggestions let us know sorry for picking on you Gunther but you are just one of our most active members which illustrates very good the problem we have on a daily basis where we have to work on not like personal, I like the passion you throw into it and I think we want the same thing in the end I just hope we find a way to work together and for now we're going to see other community members around the world also in our forums that Katrina is going to show what they've been making this month all the beautiful, wonderful, colourful creations made by Plastic thank you for watching and I'll see you guys next month and have fun with Katrina hello wonderful cat speaking and I am happy to present to the community news today as you probably know we have this online bazaar where people can besides other things buy and sell precious plastic products and every now and then we check it out and buy some of the products there to learn from them get inspired but also to show them here and show people who come by the variety the big variety of all the products from the worldwide community so let's start with precious plastic Estonia clocks thank you very much they've been making clocks pretty much since they started it's just super cool to see how within just one product one can experiment so much with different techniques and patterns and colours and probably learn a lot just by doing this one shape and at the same time making useful products which they can actually sell then we have the stool from Stilllife in the UK and this is just they make super nice stools very solid and the very cool thing here is that you can just screw in the wooden legs it's just a very simple and super clean nice solution to attach the two materials together nice work guys and last but not least maybe you remember this iPhone case mould we created and shared the blueprints for in the version 3 now we actually see a lot of people taking these files and making their own moulds to produce their iPhone cases and yeah of course we also have some on the bazaar for example from SOTOP they produce pretty nice iPhone cases now and also others from the community so that's pretty cool to see but what's maybe even more exciting about SOTOP from Germany by the way is that they came up with a very interesting machine hack which is automatic shredding which of course helps a lot in the process of preparing all the material for production and of course it would be awesome to learn how you actually did it so that the community can also learn from it this is actually a good moment to mention that we would like to share more machine hacks so if you have a cool hack or modification or combination of different machines take a cool photo and send it to us so we can share it yeah that was it for me today from the community news have a lovely day and keep on your great work sharing it with everyone love you guys bye bye I'm not Charlotte but I like Charlotte love you Charlotte