Published: Fri 28 January 2022
Updated: Fri 28 January 2022
By John McCardle
In robotics .
What's the Structural Integrity of Garbage?
I've received a lot of shipments over the pandemic. The boxes can be broken down flat, but they're in truth not that easy to rip apart or fit into a garbage or recycling can. I've thought about burning them. But, all this gently-used cardboard I'm sitting on represents a resource that's obviously being underutilized.
One of my distant inspirations was this video for turning cardboard into rigid structural parts. This is fascinating, but since the molds are 3D printed, this means you can only make things that are smaller than a 3D printer bed by some margin. I'm looking for a way to turn the many big, flat boxes I have into something like poor man's plywood.
My idea to put this cardboard to good use resulted in this experiment I call "plycard": layers of cut cardboard boxes wood glued to popsicle sticks in alternating layers.
This is probably the first picture that shows the next variable: popsicle sticks come in small and large.
Challenges and Setbacks
Many variables, limited test equipment, and lack of vocabulary to even define the problems involved. The resulting sample pieces seemed lightweight and rigid, but I didn't do any quantitative testing.
I'd love to talk to a mechanical engineer about this concept to get my head around it a bit more. Making the space to do more tests, both on the scrap cardboard inputs and the plycard outputs would help.
Favorite Part
The potential. In a world of telework and COVID protocols, a lot more stuff is arriving to my house via cardboard. With a 3D printer, I'm just missing the single board computer and the motors to turn cardboard garbage into mail order golems.
What I Learned
I learned something inconclusive about my limitations, time constraints, and attention span. I managed to get interested enough to order two giant boxes of popsicle sticks and some wood glue, but drying time, the space required to press the boards overnight, and the time to rummage through and rough-size cardboard really sapped my energy for continuing this project.
Any Future Potential?
I don't have the background knowledge to effectively move this idea forward. I may dabble a bit more anyway, though, because I may use plycard instead of wood for cases on a robot. I bet it'll be waterproof enough with a few layers of the right kind of spray primer/paint.
If I come across cheap glue or resin, I may just fill the volume between the popsicle sticks, and reduce the layers. With cardboard only on the outside and cheap popsicle sticks using up lots of volume on the inside, this still might come out as an interesting and low-cost composite material.
This article is a backblog , in which I use a template generation script to turn folders of images into a quick and dirty showcase of something I spent my time on.
