Heat Shrink Ties From Plastic Bottles and Other Junk

So I had this idea on making tie bands for holding things together using some particular pieces of jung. The whole "action" part of the device is based on the PET plastic ability to shrink when heat is applied. This instructable documents my experiment and the result.

In two words, it worked worked and the product can be useful for some implementations.

In this tutorial I'm going to show two alterations of the design. I'll start with first one.

The tie consist of two parts. One of them is a ring cut from plastic bottle. You can make multiple ~2cm wide rings, or a tube for biger "patches". The diametre of the bottle partialy determins the lenght of the tie.

After you cut the rings, flatten them.

With a hole punch make two openings on the opposite sides of the loop.

Widen the oppenings by punching another hole conjunct to the first one.

For the second part of the tie the plastic handle from wine dispencer pack is used. It has T-shaped ends and the are the part that holds the handle attched to the plastic loop.

Put one side of the handle through the hole in the loop.

To use the tie, wrap it around the object and put other end through the second opening in the loop.

Apply heat to the plastic loop part to make it shrink and secure the piece tightly.

I don't have a heat gun and heat the piece with the flame of kitchen stove. It kind ofmesses up the result a bit. The bottle piece doesn't shrink as much as I expected, so make sure that your tie sits on the object not too loose.

For the second design of the tie I'm using handle from plastic food container.

Loops from plasic bottle are narrower in this case, and the loles are made deep in the body of the loop.

The handle has mushroom shaped "knobs" on its ends. They should fit snuggly in the hole, and even kind of clasp in it.

After the first test with heating I was not satisfied with the result, so I made an improvement in the form of few subsequent holes in the loop instead of one. This way you can adjust the lenght of the tie, and if it's way too long, you can wrap it arond the object twice.

A lot of you, may already have a completely justified objection at this point: " Why you don't just cut a loop or a tube from the bottle, pull it on the object/s from one end and heat it to set? Why to implement the handle part?" Yes, if you can pell the loop/tube from one end ut would the most rational way to do it, without any handles. But if you're dealing with objects that don't have exposed open ends, like, for example, a coil of wire, floor-to-ceilling pole or exposed bend of a pipe, this might come in use.

Anyway, this is it for today, thanks for your attention and I'm still lovi'n youuuuuu!

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Today is one day after I published the instructable, and I kind of have one more idea.

For this design you only need a piece of relatively wide plastic strip, so cut it with your bottle cutter or simply with scissors. This method allows to make ties of any lenght you want.

On one end punch a hole ofdiametre that is roughly equals 1/3 of the width of the strip.

Make the othet end pointy and then punch a series of semi-circlers on its sidesthe way, shown on the photo.

To close the tie bend the pointy end a little bit and pull it through the hole on the opposite end from the underneath untill it "clasps" on desired spot.

This tie holds reasonably tight, but to improve the performance

But you can improve the strenght by adding one more hole on the same end, where the first one is.

In this case, you'll need to pull the pointy end through both holes.