Not in my backyard please.

People and Plastics.

Every material is plastic, on a scale from 0 to 100, where Zero is not plastic at all and 100 means it is plastic all the way, almost like a liquid, one example being the Modelling Clay that if properly moisturised is nice an...plastic, if not enough moisturised it becomes brittle, and if over-moisturised it becomes… mud.

States of solid matter are a trade off between its Plasticity, Elasticity and Brittleness.

Glass for instance if slightly elastic, zero plastic and highly brittle, while Nylon is highly elastic, slightly plastic and almost zero brittle.

So what is Plastic than, well… pretty much everything, except for highly brittle materials such as glass, ceramics, stone, and similar.

Saying plastic does not refer to polymers, widely known as plastic materials, but really… some of them are extremely brittle while some are highly elastic and zero brittle almost zero plasticity, and some are really supra-elastic.

Saying plastic is like saying metal… really? What metal? Iron? Aluminium? Copper? Led? Gold? Titanium? Uranium? Lithium? Sodium? Any alloy of some of them? Like Steel, Brass, Zamac, Antimonium, Stainless (don’t get me started here on how many stainless steel alloys are there)

So it is generally and really dumbly accepted in the public opinion that Plastic is… any polymer, even those that are anything but plastic in their behaviour, like the elastics elastomers…

So: Plastic actually means something that can be permanently deformed without causing it to break apart in two or more parts. And it has degrees, like in Iron, highly plastic material, but only after you take it over the elasticity point, and only up to it’s brittleness point. In other words if you try to deform it with little force, it behaves like a stone, results is zero deformation. Increase the force and it deforms a bit, but if you stop the force from acting it will return to the original form: elasticity. Put even more force into it and it will deform permanently and stay so for ever: plasticity. To bring it back to the original form you need to apply force again, a lot, in the opposite direction. If you do too much plastic deformation back and forth on the same place it will divide in two parts sooner or latter: brittleness point. Unlike the glass that if you pass it’s elasticity range (extremely small I might say, the elasticity zone) it will shatter in many pieces, extremely brittle material.

What the world understands wrongly as Plastics is in reality a poly composition of a chain of monomers forever tied to each other in an infinite repetition of self, hence a polymer. A monomer it mainly look like a liquid or a gel, because the mono molecules are not tied to eachother by any strong forces. Like water where you have H2O molecules crammed into eachother in a container (the ocean) just rubbing shoulders.

However some monomers, unlike water, in given conditions of pressure, temperature and in the presence of a catalyst (that is a reactive element that starts and maintains a reaction until the exhaustion of the reactive compound, but without becoming part of the newly created product, in the end you start with 100% monomer liquid, 100% of catalyst, and end up with 100% polymer and 100% catalyst, zero combination of the two), snap one of their monomer connection of some atom, and tie to the neighbour molecule, forming an infinite chain of married monomers, like a rope. Polymerisation occurred.

It is true that you can convince dissimilar monomers to polymerise together, one string of this monomers polymer and next to it another string of the other monomer polymer, and also holding hands or being twisted around each-other for life, a poly polymer.

Example of Polymer, you take a monomer called Amide, stick the catalyst into ti, raise the temperature to the proper one, increase the pressure or decrease the pressure even to vacuum levels and it nicely ties into Polyamide polymer also known to you as Nylon (And yes there is more than just one type of Polyamide out there) In reality I have no ideas of the thermic and pressure conditions to make Nylons but I tried to render the idea for you.

However if you make a Poly Etone Etone Ketone… that is a poly polymer known as PEEK and is expensive like hell. And sturdy, elastic, resistant to chemicals and so on, airplane structural components are made of it, also on spaceships.

So when I get a phone call to ask me to 3D print them something and I ask what materials, they say … Plastic… it drives me nuts. For now a simple question has become a black hole that sucks me in, what is it used for, what is the thermic environment it will sit or function in, does it have any mechanical stress like permanent push, permanent pull, bends and twists, what chemical liquids or vapours are around it, are they constant or they change periodically? So I can pick the right material.

Than is the price… some Chinese injection moulded mouthpiece for vapes costs 1USD at the end-user online, but if I 3D print it with the same material will cost 30 USD to the same end user and they are like… why?

Well the Chinese manufacturer spent one million on a large industrial injection machine and another million on the facilities to operate it, you know; warehouse, power supply, forklifts etc, than another 100 thousand USD on the moulds that can spit out each injection 100 mouth pieces, and do that once a minute, hence 6000 of them per hour times 20 hours a day120000 a day for 10 years, hence the price of each on production line comes down to costs, plus profit margin divided 120000 mouth pieces a day until that machine and mould go bust. So maybe 10 cents a piece, and they sell it to you at 100 cents a piece, it is called economy at scale.

When I 3d print it instead I have to take that polymer filament roll from the shelf where it sucked in moisture from the ambient for weeks, place it in a dryer for a day or two (mouthpieces cannot be made out of PLA, you need at least Nylons if not PPS), than prepare the printer, replace the nozzle with an adequate one (maybe hardened steel, or even diamond tip) to can take the abuse of said polymer passing through, replace the printing plate with an adequate one or the first layer will either not stick to it, so print failed, or stick to it for ever, let me see how you put in your mouth a mouth piece with a metal plate the size of your head permanently attached to it.

Than I slice the STL file and send it to the machine, wait for 5 minutes or 10 and is done, but meanwhile I started on it 2 days ago preparing the filament and wasted today another hour or two to prepare the machine. I am not working for free, nor are you I guess.

The funniest part is when the wannabe client does not even have a STL file and is wondering why am I charging a few hundreds of USD for CAD design to reverse engineer it in the computer so I can create the STL file needed, just because they broke some hinge that would cost them 3 USD to buy but they hope by giving me the broken one I can 3D print them one for less because 3D printing is cheap…

Conclusion (much too early one, I mean I have so many other funny stories to tell you about working with absolutely unprepared people that all they want is cheaper than impossibly cheap…), educating people that don’t care about having any education (just want cheap), is useless, let them lose if you love them, if they come back it means nobody else loves them, so let them lose again and hope they get stuck somewhere else, not in my backyard please.