My Process

I have researched the web for anyone that turns plastic to try to learn what I can to speed my progress. Sadly, all I could find was a couple of short videos from woodturners who tried it once just to try it once. There doesn't seem to be any turners who have dedicated any part of their craft to plastic. There are several people who have dedicated themselves to recycling plastic, but most of them create their products using an injection molding process that limits what they make to whatever small mold they can afford. Molds are expensive. I didn't want to be limited to trinkets produced by the thousands. I'm a one off kind of creator. I might make a thousand bowls, but no two will be the same. That's how I like it. Kudos to the injection molders for making useful object from plastic that would otherwise end up in a landfill, or worse, killing our beloved Costa Rican sea turtles. I don't want to detract from what they do, it's just not my vibe.

Others center on making panels, which I also find fascinating, but my budget at this time simply won't let me do that. The beauty of panels is that they can be cut with a CNC machine into many different types of products. Here is the site of a couple that are doing this here in Costa Rica. Beautiful stuff.
The Recycle Studio

So my dilemma, how to make the largest pieces of solid plastic that I can. Plastic, it turns out, is not an easy material to work with. Especially when trying to do it in large chunks. People may think that melted plastic can just be poured into a mold. Not so. Plastic is never liquid. It's molten which has the consistency of a thick dough, except it's 400 degrees. Handling it can only be done a few seconds at a time.

Then there is everything that must happen before you even get to melt the plastic. Finding, sorting types, sorting colors, cleaning, and shredding....
I will concentrate on the techniques that I am working on to make a piece that I can mount on the lathe. That's the stuff nobody else is doing.

I have been developing several moldng systems that try to minimize the amount of actual handling of the hot plastic. When I say molding, my goal is to create the largest piece of plastic, with the coolest "grain" to make an object from.