Water Bottle Crusher

Hi, my name is Avram and I made this for a CAD class I am taking at Maine South High School in Park Ridge, Illinois. This machine is a crank-driven crusher designed to crush empty plastic water bottles.

You need Fusion 360 and a lot of both PLA and PETG filament.

The first step was designing it in Fusion 360. This design has many different parts which include: 2 gear axles (one includes a crank on the end), 2 end caps (one includes a hole for the crank), a gearbox, 4 legs, 2 guide rails, a press plate, and a base. Here is an animation I made in Fusion of how it would theoretically work when it gets printed.

The next step is to print. I initially had the legs attached to the base when I initially printed but that ended up failing due to the height constraints of the printer and the extruder head hitting the print. My solution was to separate them into 7 separate parts. Below are the STL files for printing. You need 4 legs and 2 guide rails. Then import the files into whatever slicer you are using. I did 3 separate prints for this project. I did the gearbox and base together, the legs and guide rails together, and then the press plate by itself. Then export it into either a USB stick or straight to your printer over the cloud. I recommend using PETG for the gears and the press plate for its strength and flexibility and for everything else I used PLA. I also recommend a higher infill density for the gears and the press plate as they take a lot of the force during the crush and if they fail then the entire system will fail.

The final step is the assembly. First, you should assemble the gearbox by inserting the gears and end caps which should just snap in. Next, you need to glue the legs, gearbox, and base together. I used hot glue but super glue could also work (and would probably work better anyway). I put hot glue in the holes on the base and gearbox and let the legs and guide rails sit for around 10 minutes. I then inserted the press plate and meshed it with the gears. At this point, the machine is complete and is now ready and ready to crush (video down below).