Old HDD Vibration Table

I recently made an instructable making plastic using glue as a binder: here

One of the comments asked about bubbles in the mix, this wasn't really a problem for me as I was spreading the mix thin but when I go again I plan to make full models with the material so I need to be sure the mix is bubble-free. The best way to achieve this is vibration and the bubbles will work themselves to the surface.

I looked at lots of ways of making theses vibrations and settled on an old hard drive I had laying about.

You will need:

1 Hard Drive (we will be destroying this so make sure it is spare and wiped)

1 Lin Bin

1 Piece of cover material

1 set of precision screwdrivers with torque heads

A rotary tool with assorted accessories

Assorted nuts and bolts

Remove all of the screws from the cover of the hard drive, this one had a hidden screw under the label.

Remove the driver mechanism for the read/write head, be careful with the magnets, they are strong and pinch your fingers when they come together.

It was too much work to remove the arm and it wasn't a problem anyway so I left it.

Remove the platter.

The whole idea of using the hard drive was that they are finely balanced, upsetting that balance makes them vibrate and quite a high frequency.

To create this imbalance, I did 2 things:

1. Removed a portion of 1 edge of the platter, this trows the weight
2. Replaced all the screws on the opposing side of the retention plate (these small screws are a significant weight in a balanced system like this.

I removed the material a small bit at a time with the rotary tool and kept putting it back in to test until I was happy with the vibration.

I mounted the drive on edge inside an old lin bin.

I power the hard drive off a unit from an old external hard drive, it supply power but for some reason it needs a bump from the USB on a computer to start the hard disk spinning.

I Put a plate on the top so there is somewhere to place your beaker of material to vibrate and bolted it down to hold everything in place.

The test in the video shows a bottle of water being vibrated on the table.

The video also demonstrates that I need rubber feet on the lin bin as it wants to run across the table and I need a guard bar around the top table to stop the samples vibrating off altogether.