 Welcome to a new Pressure Plastic video. So in this video I'm going to show you how to make beams from plastic. And this technique is a good one if you really want to recycle plastic and bulk amounts because a lot of plastic goes into one tube. Now we're going to use our extrusion machine with a little upgrade to make it because this is a brand new technique. First we're going to make a mold. Then I'll show you how to extrude the plastic. Then I'll show you a little bit more techniques and options that you could also do. And finally how to upgrade the machine. But first we're going to make the mold, which is surprisingly easy. First thing is we're going to select our mold, which is just a basic metal tube. So we have a lot to choose from. You could make it round, square, flat. Doesn't really matter that much. We're going to go this time for a thick square tube. And we're going to make it three meters long. Now we got our mold ready and we're going to use the extrusion machine to fill it up with some shredded plastic. So now we're extruding mixed colors of polypropylene and it looked like red was the dominating one. So we're probably going to have a red beam. But halfway I'm going to change the color so you can see what it does and what kind of gradient it gives. But for now we just need to let the machine do its thing and wait until we have a beam. So once we take off the tube from the machine we always cool it down in water because there's a lot of pressure inside so the plastic wants to float out. So once we cool it down it gets solid and we just need to wait until this one is cooled down. Now it's time to unbox. So here we have our freshly extruded beam. As you can see from red slowly became white as we planned. The beams themselves are quite flexible compared to wood or metal but still pretty sturdy. And there are a lot of things you can do with these things but also play with the colors and the texture you can give it. But I'll show more about that in the next chapter. Yeah the world of beams is pretty interesting. Now you could just extrude a normal plain tube. However if you put a little bit care and effort into this you can get way more out of this technique. There are many things you can do with this beam technique. For instance you can make them more round like this one and this is a big one but you can also make them thinner super smooth or use a completely different shape and play around with colors as well. So here one is an even flatter one which brings a whole new world of possibilities of what to make with it and usually they come out with this little bit of a texture on it. They're not 100% smooth. But you can control this a little bit like here by adding a small wooden block inside your metal tube which gets some friction. So the plastic wants to move forward but is pulled back a little bit by this wooden block which makes it way smoother surface. But sometimes it's also just nice to have this texture. It looks like a completely new material and you could also use conventional tooling to make it super smooth like sanding or cutting. You could even drill the material super nicely but we don't recommend doing this this much because this brings a new kind of waste to it like all these little particles that you drill away. You can recycle them again but it's cool if it comes out of the tube exactly how you want it. And playing with colors is also an interesting one so for instance here we have a tube with a gradient of colors so we started by adding some dark blue, lighter blue, green, lighter green to yellow and red. But here you can see the material flows pretty smooth from one to the other which opens up a whole new world of possibilities to play with colors and paint your tubes basically. And finally you can also bend the material so if you heat it up again you could bend it into another shape you wanted to not have only straight tubes. So the material we mostly work with is polyethylene and polypropylene because the material has quite some shrinking so if it's in the tube and it cools down it shrinks so you can easily take it out. We also did some tests with polystyrene which is nice it's super hard it almost doesn't bend and you can really finish it. However this material shrinks less so it can be a bit more difficult to get it out of the tube. Alright so these are a few things we've been playing around with and we made some examples like a leather or we built this tower but overall there's still a lot more possible with this technique and a lot more to explore but it's interesting because you can really construct and build with it and play a lot with colors and textures. Yeah many things are possible when you start making beams from a tower but also smaller pieces or furniture. Now the beams are made using our extrusion machine which you have seen in our videos on how to build your own extrusion machine. However in order to make it work with this technique it needs a little upgrade. So basically the main differences is that in the original one we used this wood auger which transports the material from one side to the other it's heating up a molten so it comes out liquid. However this doesn't really build up any pressure the material just flows out but to extrude big beams you need some compression so we developed this extrusion screw where the chambers are bigger here the gaps and here they are smaller so the material flows from one side to the other but it slowly gets compressed so it builds up a lot of pressure. You can download the technical drawings of this screw yourself so you can make it or go to our online bazaar to see if you can get one. Oh and special thanks to our community member Siemen for making the technical drawing. Now you could just swap this extrusion screw for the original one and you're done. However like I said this thing builds a lot of pressure which also means more force on your machines so you want to do a few other things. You definitely need to increase the strength of your machine as well mainly the barrel holder needs to be reinforced. I would suggest to get a more powerful motor and make sure that the table or the plate it's on doesn't bend so we stop underneath some metal tubes to make sure it stays flat. The rest can pretty much stay the same so once you reinforce your machine and you can put in the screw you're ready to extrude. One thing we like to do as well is change the nozzle for the exact same one as we use in our injection machine because the thread on the end makes it easy to swap on and off molds so if you're extruding beams you can swap from one to the other to make sure it's a little bit quicker and you can set up a little production with that. Alright so that was our video on how to make a beam. This is a pretty new technique and we barely touched the surface of all the possibilities. I mean if you even start thinking about what to make with beams from big construction items to smaller furniture a lot of possible. If you have a question feel free to post the topic in our forums. If you want to know more about how to upgrade the extrusion machine go to our website where you can download all the information and make sure to send us a picture of your extruded beam. Thanks for watching and see you again in the next video.