 Hi, I'm Janis and welcome to a new Precious Plastic video. In this video, I will show you how to build the Biopress from the Beyond Plastic project. And the Biopress is pretty cool because it allows you to press basically any biodegradable material into different shapes like these little bolts or cups or actually also tiled. For all of the important information, check out our download kit and all the schematics and plans. And in this video, I will just show you all of the steps and the important little tips and tricks so you can see how I did it and copy it or make it even better. I would say let's get started. This is the Biopress. It's basically a hydraulic press and we will start by building all of the metal work for the frame. It's going to be a lot of cutting, grinding and welding, so it's going to get dusty and hot and dirty. But as I'd say, I'll just show you how it goes and let's get started. Attach this support for the jack to the frame. We will have to drill some holes so we can connect the jack later on. And for that, we will turn the jack around and put it in the drill press and then take this one and drill the holes so they are all lined up. And all the jacks are kind of different, so make sure that you find the right spots. We started to weld the longer lines. While you weld the longer lines, you will probably have to weld a few times in this corner because you need to fill it up a bit and then make sure to zigzag around so that the thing doesn't move and check the angles again. And also make sure that your braces, the two braces, that they still fit. So to make the angled braces from the flat bar, I made this little jig that makes it easier to hold everything in place while welding it. So while we weld these, make sure that all of these things are aligned perfectly and that everything is flat so that the force can go on all of the sides and not just on some of them. So now that the frame is basically welded together, we will use the off cuts from the flat bar to build some brackets into here so that we can mount the sheets later on. We will drill these first, then we will weld them into the frame so that we can later line up the sheets and drill the holes through the sheets so everything is perfectly lined up and we don't need to measure everything so precisely. And then we can tap them later on the frame so that we can screw the sheets onto that. And before we forget, we still have to weld the feet onto the legs so that we can mount everything in the end to the floor or we can put wheels under the whole thing. So we have to put those here and weld them on. All right, so now we cut the whole frame and welded it together, well done. Next we will make the sheets and these are all the covers and they basically cover all of our hydraulics and the electronics and the heating elements. Yeah, we will basically cut them with the grinder and we have a few details in the front sheet and in here that we will also cut with the grinder and use a few tricks with the drill press on how to make the radiuses and stuff. I'll just show you how to do it. Let's go. Since we welded everything together and it tends to pull stuff in, it's always good if you measure all of the real measurements and not just cut from our plans. So now that we cut all of the stuff into the sheets, we can drill the holes through the brackets. We will do this by just placing them inside and coming from the bottom and afterwards we can also tap the brackets so then we can screw on the sheets. Okay, so before we paint the metal sheets now, we will have to do some adjustments to the front panel and to the bottom plate. The front panel will get some little hinges that we will make from the off cuts from the sheet so that we can attach a little plastic box to it on the back to keep our electronics safe from dust and water and stuff like this. So basically I will put the hinges and then I can just screw the box on later. I'm using this plastic box because I found it in the trash and it fits quite well but you can also use like a milk container or I don't know I think this was maybe yogurt or whatever. And for the bottom plate, we have to make a guide for the heating element. So for that we will use some of the leftover 40 by 40 tube and cut it into rough L shapes so that we can put the L shapes around the hole and weld them onto the plate. So I would say let's go. So now we basically built the whole metalwork of the machine and now we can go over to paint it. Make sure to get heat resistant paint because you are working with hot molds and stuff on this machine and it's really good to make these panels actually kind of glossy so they're easier to clean even though the matte finish looks really nice on the rest of the frame. Yeah the sheets should be kind of shiny. Cool so now we will make the heating elements. There's one in the bottom, one in the top. They make sure to heat both parts of the mold. I'll show you right now how to do this. We have a heating element for the bottom that is connected with the pipe connected to our jack and we have a heating element for the top that is connected with these two bolts to the frame at the top. That's why we drilled the two holes into the square tube. They basically work the same. There are two aluminum blocks that we will drill a hole into and stick the cartridge heater inside and then they are both covered with the steel plates that we cut before so that the steel plates can transfer the pressure into the frame or into the box into this metal box and they are both insulated by air so the top one is pretty easy because it's working with gravity so we can just hang it and it will just hang kind of like loosely not connected to anything and the bottom one since we have to work against gravity which is super boring and we will use these springs to elevate it from the floor and then when the pressure comes it will go down and the steel plate will only touch the surroundings when it's pressing. So we will connect these springs with these little bolts that we put through the pipe connector through the metal box that we will weld together through the springs into the aluminum block and we will then connect the top plates on both of these with these little bolts. For the top one we also want to make a connector to connect the top part of the mold to the heating element so we can leave it hanging while we press and we do that by actually cutting a groove. I already drew it on here. We will cut a groove and then cover the groove with these metal plates so we can later on slide in these bolts into the groove and these bolts we will connect to the top part of the mold so we can slide it in and slide it out. So now that we finished the heating elements we can go over to adjust the jack. We'll put a few handles on it and make sure that we can reach it from the outside of the machine. Let's go. First off we need to connect the jack to the heating element which we will do with this pipe connector but in order to put this pipe connector on here we will first off have to screw this out so the pressure goes here and not onto this little sheet but we will also have to fill up the gap from the thread and the hat so when we put this on here it doesn't move so so much. I'm using a PVC tube for that that I just found in the trash. You can use anything that fits around and is the size of this and then the rest is connecting the jack to the control and front panel. We will have to put in the handle for the manual pumping. We will connect that with a thread and just a screw. The same for the release valve we will extend it with this tube and we will use another little tube that I found to make a little knob so it's easier to move and last but not least we have to connect the pneumatic pump and we will use this to extend the knob of that a little bit so we can actually press it down more easily. I also found this o-ring to go around this thread and that makes it look a little bit nicer from the outside so I will also use that feel free to find something like this. So I would say I'll just show you how to do it and then we can put it in the machine. So now that we're done with the jack we'll go over to the electronics. For the electronics make sure to check the schematics that we put in the download kit because they are much clearer and easier to follow than watching my hands and I would just say let's connect some cables. For the electronics we need a bunch of cables, some of these like blue things, some red things. We also need some clamps like these and we need most importantly our PID controller, our sensor, our relay and our switch. I will show you how to do all of that that's kind of basic and what's really important is that we connect the ground of the power cable to the whole frame so that if something goes wrong also like after using the machine we don't get electrocuted because that would kind of suck. Cool so now that we're done with the electronics we'll go over to build this wooden box that we use as a guide for the bottom heating element. We will do that on the one hand to insulate this metal box a little bit better. On the second we will use it as a little guide within this frame that we built and we will use it so it covers up these springs when we pump up the jack because otherwise they would come out of the bottom plate and that might be a little weird when we use the machine. So I will just chop up this board a little bit and then attach it to the box but let me show you how it works. So now we can assemble everything we prepared everything very well so it's going to be pretty quick and easy. We will start by putting in the jack and attaching it to the frame then we will put in the front sheet and the heating elements and connect everything to the electronics and then cover everything up with the beautiful sheets we made. So as an add-on for the machine we also built this table. The table is not 100% necessary but it's super handy to slide in and out your mold and to have space to work on. Cool the machine is done good job. This is the switch to turn it on. This is the PID controller to set the temperature. This is the pneumatic button to use the air compressor to pump up the mold and this is the manual handle to pump up the mold. This is the release valve to lower the mold. Yeah and I would say let's just make a cup. Now we made this cup that's actually edible so super nice. Make sure to check out our download kit for all of the detailed plans and the materials and recipes and make sure to check out the next video which is about how to run this machine how to set up a workspace like this how to make a bowl from orange peels and if you have any comments or questions feel free to ask them here or on our community platforms and for now I would say let's see each other again in the next precious plastic video. Where you care? And before you go we just wanted to let you know that precious plastic runs on the funds and support of people just like you. Everything we develop is posted online open source for free so we have people all over the world working on the plastic waste problem. If you want to help us go and support that preciousplastic.com and make a donation or find another way you can help. Thank you!