A couple years ago,
I was surfing around the internet
and I came across a cool article
about a small company in Russia
who would recycle 2-liter plastic bottles
and turn them into brooms.
Crazy idea, right?
They take the plastic bottles and set them up into a machine
that they've created that extracts small thin strips of plastic rope
which then they can bundle up and turn them into heads of brooms
This blew my mind, and ever since then I've wanted to try it for myself
Now over the years I've seen a lot of different tutorials pop up and a lot of different inventions made
on how to do this very thing.
The problem is, the cost of the equipment materials range anywhere from about $5 to $30.
The purpose of this video today is to see if we can make plastic soda bottle string at home
By making a simple little device that costs absolutely nothing to make.
Now the only tools you're going to need to make this work are some kind of a knife, a block of wood, and a saw.
Now the only reason you're using the saw is to cut the block of wood.
If you have some kind of a knife like this with the serrated teeth, you might be able to get with just the knife and the wood itself.
You can also make this work with just a basic kitchen knife and I'll put that to the test later on.
Now to make device today, I'm using a block of two-by-two that I cut 5 inches long.
You dont have to use the same thing.
You can get away with a thicker tree branch or any other kind of wood as well.
Now since I have a bench-vice, I am going to use that, but that isn't required.
In any case, this is how it works.
Go ahead and clam your piece of wood an inch from the top is showing, and we're going to cut this with the grain.
You can look down at the top of your piece of wood and see which ways the lines are running
We're going to be cutting with those lines.
With our block in place we can begin cutting, so grab your saw and start cutting exactly down the middle until we make a cut one inch deep.
Once the saw is bottomed out at one inch, we can turn the blade around and cut horizontally until it cuts half way through the block from the front side
Now, all that's left to do is take your knife blade or something like a chisel and position it half way down the right side of the block and give it a little tap
This will knock the little wedge out of the bottom-right corner and as easy as that, our machine is pretty much ready for use.
The only thing left to do now is add the blade.
Now with this system, you can make a thickness of rope just about as wide as you want, but I want mine to be on the thinner side, so I'm using the but end of an 8 inch drill bit as a guide.
Place your spacer down into the corner of the block and then take the tip of your knife and push it into the corner as well.
Now move your fingers out of the way and apply a little pressure to the tip of the knife until it sinks into the wood.
Once the tip of your blade is in about half an inch, push the rest of your blade into the side piece of wood until it grabs on and holds firmly in place.
So, update guys. Our simple machine is finished and its completely ready to start making plastic string.
and now there's just one small modification we need to make to these bottles before they're ready to run through it.
Now if you look down here at the bottom of the bottles, you'll see this little ridge line that you can use as a guide for cutting it off.
We want to make the smoothest, cleanest cut possible because that will give the most plastic string we can get.
Bonus hack: we get a little plastic bowl out of it.
Now if you feel like you did a bit of hack job with the end of your bottle, dont feel bad, you can easily clean it up with a pair of scissors.
Alright guys, the moment of truth. We've got our bottle prepped and ready. We've got our machine standing by and all we have to do now is take the bottom edge of our bottle, feed it through the gap in the wood,
and help it make one full rotation.
Perfect. Now its ready.
So, I've helped the bottle do one full rotation. What's that done is cleaned up any jagged edges on the bottom, and you can so how on the back here, we've got a piece of string sticking out now,
And if we give this thing a tug, we can see the bottle start spinning, giving us loads of extremely strong plastic string.
So you can see now its as easy as tugging on this string and the whole bottle unwinds and gives us a nice bundle of strong, plastic rope.
This is really about as thin as you can get this stuff. If you go any thinner, its going to start breaking on you.
But that is really thin. I'm loving it. You can use that for fishing line.
Now just for convenience, I turned this thing over sideways because it relieves the pressure on the bottle so its not rubbing up on the knife.
It also allows me to grab the string and pull it out at a more comfortable angle so I can do this all day.
Pretty sweet isn't it?
It just keeps going, and going, and going.
Now you might be wondering what kind of uses there are for plastic string, and the answer is probably as many uses as there are for normal string.
You can use it as improvised fishing line, you can use to rig a snare or hold up your tent when you're out in the woods.
or if you're using something like my rope-making machine, you might be able to wind it into an actual length of rope.
Now there really are so many ways that you can approach this guys. You can use kitchen knives, you can use hunting knives, you can use wooding knives.
You can even use razor blades out of your utility knife and shove that up in there as well.
As for as the thickness of the rope goes, your can make anything, almost as thin as fishing line, to about as thick of any cable as you'd want to make.
And for as thin as this chord is, it really is pretty strong stuff.
Of course you can break it.
But the thicker you go.....
The much more difficult it is to break.
That's as hard as I could do it.
So would you look at that. Our home made machine that costs absolutely nothing to make is working and its working very well.
So lets move on to all these plastic bottles and try and transform them into string.
Sweet!
If you run your string in a line across the room, it'll help relieve the tension, and if you wind it around a water bottle, it'll organize it into a neat little bundle.
So update guys. We recycled 12 two liter bottles and made nearly twelve hundred feet of plastic string.
We did measure our results and found that one two liter bottle makes nearly 100 feet of 8th inch plastic string by itself.
So it looks like this idea works guys, and it works great.
Using nothing but extremely simple materials you can probably find in the woods and definitely around your house.
You can turn your old two liter bottle into a piece of plastic cordage.
And I have to give credit where credit's due.
The simplicity of this project came from an idea I got from Creek Stewart in his book "Survival Hacks".
And I'll put an Amazon link to that down in the description.
And as always, thanks for joining for this project. I'll be looking for you in the next one.
Talk to you then.