Introduction: Old HDD Vibration Table

By Murray Woodcraft

I recently made an instructable making plastic using glue as a binder: here

One of the comments asked about bubbles in the mix, this wasn't really a problem for me as I was spreading the mix thin but when I go again I plan to make full models with the material so I need to be sure the mix is bubble-free. The best way to achieve this is vibration and the bubbles will work themselves to the surface.

I looked at lots of ways of making theses vibrations and settled on an old hard drive I had laying about.

Step 1: Get Started

You will need:

1 Hard Drive (we will be destroying this so make sure it is spare and wiped)

1 Lin Bin

1 Piece of cover material

1 set of precision screwdrivers with torque heads

A rotary tool with assorted accessories

Assorted nuts and bolts

Step 2: Strip the Hard Drive

Remove all of the screws from the cover of the hard drive, this one had a hidden screw under the label.

Remove the driver mechanism for the read/write head, be careful with the magnets, they are strong and pinch your fingers when they come together.

It was too much work to remove the arm and it wasn't a problem anyway so I left it.

Remove the platter.

Step 3: Create the Imbalance

The whole idea of using the hard drive was that they are finely balanced, upsetting that balance makes them vibrate and quite a high frequency.

To create this imbalance, I did 2 things:

  1. Removed a portion of 1 edge of the platter, this trows the weight
  2. Replaced all the screws on the opposing side of the retention plate (these small screws are a significant weight in a balanced system like this.

I removed the material a small bit at a time with the rotary tool and kept putting it back in to test until I was happy with the vibration.

Step 4: Mount It Up

I mounted the drive on edge inside an old lin bin.

I power the hard drive off a unit from an old external hard drive, it supply power but for some reason it needs a bump from the USB on a computer to start the hard disk spinning.

I Put a plate on the top so there is somewhere to place your beaker of material to vibrate and bolted it down to hold everything in place.

Step 5: Test

The test in the video shows a bottle of water being vibrated on the table.

The video also demonstrates that I need rubber feet on the lin bin as it wants to run across the table and I need a guard bar around the top table to stop the samples vibrating off altogether.