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great idea. ill have to hunt down a essential oil infuser. and do some small scale tests.

no, most styro foam is gassed via steam or on some cases pentane. and in both cases its gone by the time it gets to the subscriber. back in the 70's it was full of pretty nasty gasses but the industry cleaned up in the 80's

video is missing, what do you do with your gorilla glue dough?

I can't say my vacuum chamber experiments really helped. i suspect if i could do heat and vacuum perhaps, but it felt like the drying time was about the same or slower. but then again i had a pretty cheap single stage pump. Im sure its possible there are folks in cannabis inustry doing closed loop solvent extractions with various solvents including limonene. im curious how your wood stabilization ideas work, im pretty sure once fully dry it will machine ok (probably a little chippy. brittle, but better with the wood to help. ) but may take a bit of time to really cure. please keep me posted on any successes/failures

easy? relatively.. just need a mound of orange peels. (if you can find a juice vendor you might be able to ask for the citrus peels. and then its a pretty simple "essential oil" distilation

indeed, i have done some with multiple runs, its also possible that insulating it from the steel bed may be good too, may be wicking out the heat a bit. sorry for the delay on the reply, never saw the notification. Thanks for stopping by Quelab. it is a place near and dear to my heart for nearly 10 years now!

no its not, most common plated neodymium permanently loose their magnetic field at about 350C see the near the bottom under temperature effects. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Neodymi... ive also recently been tinkering with selectively blanking sections of neodymium with heat, so i can say i have first hand evidence that a soldering tip will easily go above 400C https://www.instructables.com/Hiding-Messages-in-Magnets-Co2-Laser-Blanked-Neody/

I think that blue PSU on your opening picture there is one pin on there to the laser that if not grounded will stop the laser powersupply. this is what our lid and our water sensor interlocks are tied into. on our laser engraver.

I have not tried, but i did a google search and there are a few youtube videos, and a good number of research papers, looks like you may need a good source of citrus peels, (perhaps you have a nearby juice bar or orange/grapefruit juice making company, and see if you can get them to give you the leftover rinds/peels. if not it can apparently be extracted from the Mint plant too. but i do hear you need a fair amount of peels/mint to make much limonene. here is a pretty good paper on it. https://sites.uci.edu/chem52labs/files/2016/10/M52LA_Exp5_F16UP2.pdf

I usually just stir it now and then, and the bubbles come out. later on when im going to work with it, its susally pretty bubble free. i dont kneed it, atelast until ive dried it a bit, my favorite state to work with it in is when its kinda thick like a gumdrop or gummy bear, i then put that into molds and apply under 130-150F (it bubbles at higher temp.)

yep when fully hard its like any other hard plastic. (feels kinda like how dice feel)

sent you an email reply. but here is a public one too. D-limonene is just one of the essential oils found in citrus peels. although i hear there is a terpene in lavender oil that works on eps just about the same. this year i embarked in using it on dirty, dusty, food stained plastics, and while you wont get a perfect end result its pretty good. i have found the EPS and limonene will float on water, so you can pour several cups of water in, to the bucket first. and then pour in the limonene, and as you dunk in styrofoam alot of the dirt and other stuff falls out to the water layer on the bottom. also makes the limonene go a but further because as it gets thicker and thicker with eps, you can still dunk/coat new eps.

no bags are PP or PE not PS plastics. almost no solvents wor with them.

yes. a little more brittle than action figures, but over the span of about a month or two in good ventalation unless suepr thick (like more than a inch thick) they will harden to a resin like plastic hardness.

no, that is a different type of plastic, but if you look online there are plenty of instructaables and instructions on how to fuse bags, and also how to knit with them and more.

replaced the broken link with a new one.

yes, im vaguely looking into both extrusion and injection of the PS and D-limonene. im also interested in seeing if additives such as butylated rubber particles in it to see if i can make HIPS plastic at home and if so can we print with it.

I believe this article was a influence on some of my initial research for a use for extra styrofoam. https://www.instructables.com/Recycling-Styrofoam-EPS-Into-Castable-Styrene-Plas/

maybe, i suspect it would hotglue gun melt pretty well once a majority of the solvent has evaporated.

Indeed the Laquer thinner was interesting, it is indeed a dough like consistency, yes it does end up crusting over and bubbling up inside, so all my tests did also puff up. but indeed was one of the more interesting side avenues i wandered down in my playing with PS. Yes painting should be fine once the solvent is out, although some spraypaints have a solvent that will soften the surface, and some model paints may too but the melting may pop some surface bubbles, but would make the paint stick really well. old classic snap and glue plastic kids models are all made out of injected polystyrene.

a thin enough tube should prevent the water/syrup from flowing out. be sure to stop any leaks where air can get in. you should only get about a tablespoon out before the vaccuum at the top is great enough to hold the water in.

air trying to come in.

yep some of the more volitile solvents work pretty well to weld styrofoam, i think the d-limonene's slow drying would lead to slumping and sliding, but even then adding a little fresh limonine on the surface of styrofoam will degas what it touches, but quickly turns thick and sticky. i think id suggest a glue of like 1 part solvent and a bunch of parts styrofoam so that it wont eat your blocks..

Cool, no real info. but pretty much that. im glad someone is doing it, added it to the list of youtube videos above. https://youtu.be/s1hi6M7ek-E

i would mostly agree, yes acetone, mek, toluene, all are a bit flammable and volatile i too would avoid working on them eound sparks or flame, but in general all the heating is done days or weeks into the drying procces and the D-limonene is far less volitile and far less explosive.

cool thanks for the link, i suspect i may have found it, and its also on the MSDS safety sheet for limonene. ive herd of people smothing 3d prints made out of HIPS plastic, (which is a blend of plasticiser and polystyrene) ive not looke into if its brushing it on, or vaporizing it. im tempted to see what it will do with one of those cheapo essential oil vaporizors.

perhaps, i have not tried. if you do let us know how it goes. i may give it a try sometime.

both eps and xps do melt, but yes the blue xps was much slower, i suspected it had a wax coating to decrease periability, but it may just be the close dnature of it, i did find the addition of a little acetone got it going and once i had that mix i just left the scraps to degasify and then i left it out for a while to evaporate off the acetone. it was still there though, and you can see many of my blue cast things are lighter color and bubbly.

yeah ive seen the densifiers, and there are some companies that are buying and grinding and dying the blocks and re-extruding them into picture frames and other stuff. but as for heat alone, yes and no, once its dencified perhaps, but before that its so insulative, its hard to get anything but the surface to a melting temp. the solvent super lowers the glass transition point too in my processes listed above, which is nice so i dont have to go to the scorching/degradation point of the goop.

this may help. its specifically a non polar.. https://www.masterorganicchemistry.com/2012/04/27/... and yes im sure there is an excess of limonene even months after starting drying. some of the other suggestions to try flattening it into sheets with my pasta machine may be onto something. and indeed im curious to see if there is anything that will disolve or attract or break down safgelt the limonene.

good idea! I just so happen to have a thrift store hand crank pasta machine i've been keeping around for sculpey or other non food use. might be tricky to gage when the insides are thick enough to not squirt or something. but its an idea. someone else suggested a hot press or panini machine or possibly a old waffle maker. but is have to hack them to be low enough temp to not burn the polystyrene.

I have not, but when all the solvent has evaporated, it feels looks acts and burns like polystyrene. feels like those old snap and glue airplane models from my youth (most of those were all injection molded polystyrene. Vacuum does not really help, it causes the solvent to bubble up, you might be able to make faster harder castings by pulling a small low pressure and heating it then. to get the solvent to leave faster, but you still risk having a extra bubbly. or extra wrinkly verizon. ive tried a bunch of different things with my vacuum chamber. if there were no volatiles in it it might help.. but as a general rule no.

As for any chemical equations, not really, there is a link on the last page above to a calculator that my 20 years out of college brain was able to grock only a little of whats going on when a solvent does its magic, but the answer is do i have a forumula? not particularly, its just that as simple as. Polystyrene is soluble in d-limonene, just like how salt is soluble in water, no real chemical composition change, just gave pretty much gave it enough lubricant to slide around into the solution, once it dries out it turns back to a solid. or think of it as a melted chocolate bar, may not have the squares, but when you cool it off its still chocolate. may have a different temper, and or texture which is also true of other solvents and EPS

no there is no chemical change to the polystyrene, it is just dissolving the bonds between the molecules. there is a bit of pentane sometimes bubbled into the plastic to make it expand but most of all of that escapes long before it gets to you.its more like salt dissolved in water, when you dry the water out you get the salt back. Acetone itself gives off a lot of fumes and they are not great for you, which is why i wound up going with the D-limonene, as of now there are no known health risks for some breathing exposure to limonene fumes although i do take some precautions to make sure i'm not inhaling too much of them.

easiest thing to do is add a black disposable #6 PS plastic picnic plate or solo cup. takes about a week to fully harden with acetone, depending on how thick it is, the eps dries out on the surface making the middles a little harder to dry.

over the last year ive tinkered with a bunch of solvents, to degasify EPS, and work with the resulting goop.. here is my instructable using D-limonene instead of acetone, acetone is fast, but you end up with a bubbly/white end result. limonene is slower to dry, but much nicer to be around. https://www.instructables.com/Recycling-Styrofoam-EPS-Into-Castable-Styrene-Plas/

Sadly, i don't have any IOS devices so someone else will need to help you with that.