Injection moulded wheels

[Technic Jim]

Hello all,

Recently my school has purchased an Injection Moulder. As of yet we haven't bought any moulds for it so have just got the one set of moulds it came with: a wheel. The finished wheel has a 5cm diameter on the plain side of the wheel, tapering in to 4.5cm on the spoked side. The wheel can be made out of two types of plastic. One is recycled bottle lids (any HDPE, recycling code 2, plastic works) either shredded or hand chopped very finely or some small plastic pellets that came with the machine. Out of the wheels I made the rougher, green one was bottle lids and the smoother blue one was the funny little pellets. The first thing I thought when I saw the finished wheel was 'Drifting!!'. However, there were a few problems. The main problem was the fact that the wheels didn't have an axle hole. I tried to counter this by gluing bushings on but these weren't straight and I couldn't get them centred. The other problem was the small size. The 5cm diameter was too small to be any good for me to use, with my range of pieces and motors. So, unfortunately, there is no drifting vehicle .

The pictures attatched are of the top and bottom of the two different wheels. Sorry about the quality, I haven't quite figured out how to use my GoPro+New lighting setup yet!

[SevenStuds]

This is interesting. For other projects how and where can you get other moulds? If you can't make the moulds yourself to be compatible, I understand that there could be a barrier as to what you can make. Otherwise I love the quality the purple wheel has. Keep us updated with any new designs!

[Technic Jim]

This is interesting. For other projects how and where can you get other moulds? If you can't make the moulds yourself to be compatible, I understand that there could be a barrier as to what you can make. Otherwise I love the quality the purple wheel has. Keep us updated with any new designs!

You can buy aluminium moulds for the injection moulder but we are going to do something with our laser cutter so that, in theory, you should be able to design any mould you want. As for new ideas, there probably won't be any but I'm thinking of laser cutting a guide for the wheels so the bushings can be perfectly centred.