Clever recycling and repurposing hacks?
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Tom, you are pretty close to the truth. I live in Arizona, so turning the heat off and donning a wool sweater in the winter is no big deal. And we are eyeing a cave house in Spain which is a lot more permanent than a yurt, but equally counter culture. Just waiting for the Euro to crash to make the exchange rate more attractive. After all, slippery slopes are the basis of the joy of skiing.
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This frame for this bed consists of 2-liter soda bottles and one sheet of plywood with holes drilled to accept the bottle necks. A small amount of highly-liquid black acrylic paint is poured inside the bottles and tumbled until they are coated. All holes and edges of the plywood are eased with a router equipped with a rounding over bit. The upper section represents the standard box springs and mattress.
Comments on the concept are welcome. -
Interesting concept... how do the top and bottom attach to one another? Won't the bottles tend to bend or skew outward?
You'll probably stay dry if your house floods, considering the amount of upthrust*- not sure that is the right word. buoyancy might be better? or lift? not sure not sure.
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@unknownuser said:
Interesting concept... how do the top and bottom attach to one another? Won't the bottles tend to bend or skew outward?
You'll probably stay dry if your house floods, considering the amount of upthrust*- not sure that is the right word. buoyancy might be better? or lift? not sure not sure.
Some good questions. Worthy of a rethink. Perhaps it would be better to arrange the bottles in a hexagonal stacking matrix to that all the bottles touch and join them with silicone adhesive. I could be done as one large unit or in units of seven bottles as that configuration would be inherently stable as it would be wider than tall.
I used to have a small sailboat and kept the areas in the hold, in the cabinets and under the beds filled with empty two liter bottles just in case we would be swamped by a following sea or developed a hole in the hull. The boat has been knocked down sideways in rough conditions on San Francisco Bay.
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@roger said:
Comments on the concept are welcome.
It looks more like one of those devices that crushes you! 
You're beginning to sound like my dad (who oddly enough, is also called Roger)!
(fortunately he's now almost 70 and I'm 43, so I flew the nest years ago, but he too was obsessed with these 'green' solutions. In fact we visited some remote recycling joint on Vancouver Island in the late 1970's so he could make a report for the British Labour Party, back here (yes, you guys can partly blame my dad for the horror of green politics so inherent in the Labour Party! 
It actually got so bad at home that in the end my mother walked out on him, because (partly- she also had her other other reasons 
) he refused to install a working central heating in a barn we had converted to a house- it was bloody freezing in there during the winter! We were one of the first families in Britain to convert an English barn into a house (built by me, my dad and a handful of others). The local farmers caught on and got in on the act in the early 1980's and made even more money than they already owned, then the stockbroker belt of London moved down to Lewes, and the rest is history. So, my British chums, you who are fed up about being lectured about green politics and 'heathy' eating, you can partly blame my dad for that!! Lynchmob? You have my full sympathy! 
)Rant over.
Back to the bed, Why not just use wood? Wood would be far easier to pack away (I presume that the lids screw back on against the top wood part to hold it in place? I'd hate to the one who would have to take those all off again!) And, how will you get the strength from the bottle neck? There will be an immense amount of pressure exerted on the neck of the bottle. You may find that one night you roll over, and land with a thud on the ground, while one side of your bed collapses!
Another option of course, is "freecycle"
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@unknownuser said:
Won't the bottles tend to bend or skew outward?
Ah yes, I've been beaten to it!
Most green sticky-paster ideas, imo are silly. It is better to design something so well, that it'll last. Unfortunately, designing things to last doesn't bode well with capitalism.
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Dear Tom the pipe guy, regarding the rant:
I think I would like your dad a lot. I suspect the lack of central heating had less to do with green than being a clever way to get his son out of the house.Now, in regard to the bed. Are you sure you are an architect? Let's assume that two people, springs and a mattress came to 600 pounds. Pro rated over 165 bottles that is a whopping 3.64 pounds per bottle (Did you really mean to use the word IMMENSE? [I didn't think so]). Hopefully you are not allowed to do structural calculations in your office. I weigh about 240 pounds and have jumped on one of these bottles giving it a tremendous shock load. I neither splits or blows off the screw cap. In the local supermarket I have seen these bottles in 1/4 height bottle carriers stacked 5 crates high with no bending or deformation.
In fact PET plastic soda bottles have a design rating of 200 psi. One atmosphere is 14.7 psi. Soda is around 55 psi (55/14.7 = 3.74 atmospheres)
A Mercedes C class sedan weighs 2,271 pounds. When divided by 165 bottles, each bottle would only need to carry 13.76 pounds per bottle. Would you be willing to put a few Euros on a capped 2 liter PET bottle being able to support 13.76 pounds? [I didn't think so.]
You ask why not use wood? I built a couch from Mahogany from a single board. The board cost $500 right from the lumber yard. I also built a quarter-sawn oak coffee table to plans from a wood working magazine. They estimated the cost of wood at $200. I had the local lumber yard cut down some boards for me and went to check out. When they gave me a bill for $200, I smiled and said thanks I hope you can sell boards of this dimension because I am not paying $200 bye, bye. Soda bottles are free for the taking. I am on a fixed income (actually not fixed as for the second year in a row there has been no cost of living increase). I also find the soda bottle aesthetic interesting when not left to chaotically litter a landscape or become part of a land fill. Also they weigh very little (52 grams per bottle) compared to the space they take up. One-hundred-sixty-five bottles plus the plywood weigh less than my current bed frame. Availability speaks for itself.
@tfdesign said:
@roger said:
Back to the bed, Why not just use wood? Wood would be far easier to pack away (I presume that the lids screw back on against the top wood part to hold it in place? I'd hate to the one who would have to take those all off again!) And, how will you get the strength from the bottle neck? There will be an immense amount of pressure exerted on the neck of the bottle. You may find that one night you roll over, and land with a thud on the ground, while one side of your bed collapses!
Another option of course, is "freecycle"
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@roger said:
Perhaps it would be better to arrange the bottles in a hexagonal stacking matrix to that all the bottles touch and join them with silicone adhesive.
Hexagonal sounds good. But instead of adhesive, I was thinking you could put a band around them to hold them together. Something that doesn't stretch too much... something like this:
No idea about the price though. But probably cheaper than mahogany
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Your idea is sparking another idea. That stuff looks a bit like edge banding, but the woven stuff looks like the native made palm hats made by pacific islanders. Here in Phoenix we have millions of palm trees when, in fact, there is only one small grove of native palms hidden in one very remote canyon. So there is tremendous amount of activity and energy that goes into trimming palms and dumping the leaves into landfill. Bottle cluster bands woven from palm leaf would be an interesting reuse.
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We had that full lunar eclipse near the winter solstice last night. Of course we had thick cloud, so I did not see it. However I looked up some astronomy in anticipation of the event. In the process, I found out that Galileo built the tube of the first telescope from repurposed copper plumbing tubing. That made my day. Galileo changed the course of science and history with a pipe that brought water to his bathroom. I feel totally vindicated in my interest in repurposing.
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Take one Ikea wall vase with draecena (plant) and throw the draecena away. Then add a solig solar lamp. You can use the spike that comes with the solig walkway lamp but I prefer a thick bolt with a decorative acorn nut at the bottom and you just slip the solig over the bolt.
Also the plastic covered solar cell degrades in strong UV light, but I find the sun is so strong here in Arizona that you can cover the cell with a white plastic shopping bag when it is charging out doors and still get a full charge. The aluminum plate just screws to any wall indoor or outdoor.I have some material and lighting issues at the moment and will improve the render when I understand what is going on.
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Nice outdoor light idea! Shouldn't you find a use for the draecena, too? I like Ikea hacks. I was looking for a good, DIY bike rack and found this image through Google image search.
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[/img]Unfortunately, none of the blogs it seems to be posted on still have it up or something. I can't find any information about what Ikea product it is made from.
This isn't a very elaborate recycling hack, but I like it quite a bit: in my architecture office, we go through a lot of paper. Most of it goes in the recycle bin when it is discarded. Then I see people walking around with new notebooks. Don't get me wrong, I love a good notebook, but all that one-sided paper has another good side! We have a binding machine, so I've taken to cutting the used-on-one-side paper down to 4.25"x11" and binding a stack on the short edge. The long and narrow proportion is perfect for making lists (and I make a lot of lists). Then I can keep my sketch book as an archive of my ideas and not clutter it with a lot of day-to-day mundane stuff.
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Was only kidding about tossing the plant. However we do forget to add water to the mini vase and they die. The sconce is so simple that I may make my own. I could make a plywood die and feed in aluminum blanks and apply pressure with wood working clamps.
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Would that work? Wouldn't the aluminum straighten out a bit after you release it? Your form might have to "overbend" the aluminum to take that into account, no?
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You might be right. There are a number of variables involved. However, if you get close you can probably do a little adjustment by hand. Trial and fit. -
Well, if you give it a try, I'd like to see the final result!
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This came to me while I was doing a watercolor sketch of my uncle who was a WWII bombardier.
If you are an artist here is an IKEA hack for you. The round IKEA magnet board makes a great drawing and painting tool. You can use magnets for hold downs. The board rotates easily so you can orient the picture to the stroke of your brush or pencil. However it can trap air when used on a tilted surface which will cause it to fall to the floor. To combat this, I put some furniture pads on the back so it can slide, but not just float on trapped air.
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@unknownuser said:
I also built a quarter-sawn oak coffee table to plans from a wood working magazine. They estimated the cost of wood at $200. I had the local lumber yard cut down some boards for me and went to check out. When they gave me a bill for $200, I smiled and said thanks I hope you can sell boards of this dimension because I am not paying $200 bye, bye.
A bit of an old quote Roger, but I'm not sure I understood this story. They said it'd cost about $200, they cut the wood for you, then when you found out for sure that it'd be $200, you left them with the already cut boards and left?
-Brodie
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@unknownuser said:
@unknownuser said:
I also built a quarter-sawn oak coffee table to plans from a wood working magazine. They estimated the cost of wood at $200. I had the local lumber yard cut down some boards for me and went to check out. When they gave me a bill for $200, I smiled and said thanks I hope you can sell boards of this dimension because I am not paying $200 bye, bye.
A bit of an old quote Roger, but I'm not sure I understood this story. They said it'd cost about $200, they cut the wood for you, then when you found out for sure that it'd be $200, you left them with the already cut boards and left?
-Brodie
Brodie, I think I typed that late at night and didn't proof read it. I was working from some plans in a wood working magazine. The author said the entire coffee table with quarter-sawn oak, hardware and finish should come in at around $200 plus or minus. I went to the lumber store and asked for quarter sawn oak and they said they didn't have it. So then I said give me some white oak regular sawn. When I got to the check out they gave me a bill for $500. Maybe I should have done the math, but $500 vs $200 (a price that came from a current wood working magazine not something found in my garage from 1930)it was a "you can keep it and I'm not coming back moment". I found a small neighborhood mill that sold me the wood for close to $200 and gave them the rest of my business for the time I continued to live in the area. You might not think it ethical, but I really felt that it was me that was getting stiffed.
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Aw, that makes much more sense. Assuming $200 was a fair price for that amount of quarter sawn oak (beautiful stuff), I can't imagine spending $500 for regular oak. I worked at a home improvement store for awhile (Menards, which is only in the midwest but it's basically the same as Lowes or Home Depot). I worked in millwork so I was cutting trim for people all the time. I can't quite equate it to selling $500 worth of wood but it never really bothered me much when I saw a bunch of trim coming back that someone had decided not to get. Then again, I was just a grunt getting paid by the hour so it was all the same to me. We would periodically throw away the pieces smaller than 5' or so because few people needed them and they just started falling all over the place (not really 'throw away,' they all got sent along with defective merchandise back to the distribution center - no one could ever tell me what the heck they did with that stuff but I suspect it wasn't worth as much effort as we spent bundling it up and shipping it back).
-Brodie
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