Orchid pot making details.

[bil]

OK, Bethmarie asked me about this, so I figured there might be enough people interested to explain it in detail.

First off, safety. I'm a bit reckless, so when I am on a project, my hands tend to be a tapestry of cuts, burns and marks. Two things tho I take great care of are my sight and hearing. So, do at least wear protective goggles and ear defenders when you are cutting the pots. The disc cutter has a habit of spitting out globs of molten plastic, and the thought of getting hit in the eye with one of those makes me queasy.

OK, to start out, find a suitable pot. Or two. Remember we are looking for two pots that fit together, the bigger forming the bottom and the smaller the rim of the pot.

You need to work out not just the diameter you want, but also how deep. For example, the base of the 40 cm pot with the top of the 35 gave me a 15 cm deep pot that was perfect for phals. 35 base plus a 30 top gave me a nice shallow pot 6cm deep that works well for den phals, and the 30 base plus a 25 top wuld give me a 10 cm deep or an 8 depending on whether the lip went inside the pot or outside.
From that you can see that if I bought a 40, a 35, a 30 and a 25 I would get 3 pots for the price of 4, and I would have a spare large top and small bottom, if I wanted to go bigger or smaller. Never throw away leftovers. I even keep a couple of bits of scrap. I dropped a pot the other day, and it cracked. Since they take time and money to make, I don't like throwing them away. If the crack isn't too bad, you can weld it, but be careful, a splash of burning plastic will burn deep and hard, and you can't get it off.

I cut a strip about a cm wide and about 20 cm long, and I set fire to one end, and as it burns, let it drip on the crack in the inside as no one will see it there. The plastic sits burning on the crack, for long enough, but not so long that it melts all the way thru.

It pays to practise on a broken bit of scrap first.

The pic is the two pots with the big one on top. You use them like this to measure how far into the small one the big pot will go.

[bil]

Ok, this is the disc cutter I use. The disc is one of the ones that are like thin card. I don't know if it is specifically for plastic, but it does work.

When you have worked out where to cut the pot, make a pile of wood offcuts that I use as shims/spacers so that when the felt tip marker is held flat on it, the tip touches where the mark is. Then all you do is hold the pen in place and rotate the pot so that you leave a nice even mark round it. I have a collection of shims of all thicknesses as they are invaluable.

You will notice that these pots have a kind of step out bit just under the lip. That cann make measuring difficult, so I often cut the small pot at that point, put the base aside, clean the lip up, and then slide that up the pot so I can mark where to cut the base I like to do it so that the finished base drops into the lip, rather than having the lip on the inside. A few of my plants are hung from loops that sit under the lip, and if the lip was on the inside, and the welds failed the pot would fall.

To cut the pot, I go freehand. You could make a jig to hold the cutter still and rotate the pot onto it, and that would be better.. I just haven't figured a good jig out yet. Try to use a gentle hand and not let the disc sit too long in the cut without moving it or the plastic will melt. If it does, don't try and remove it with your fingers before it cools. Plastic burns are nasty.

If you do burn yourself ever, if you get onion juice on it quickly, it really helps. It won't help burns on thin shiin like wrists, back of hands etc, but on the ppalm of the hand, if you cut the root end off the onion and apply the juice to the burn, it will stop a blister forming. A friend burnt her hand badly, and she got her OH to grate an onion into a plastic bag, and she immersed her hand into that, working her hand in it for an hour or two. Her hand stank really bad, but not one blister.

[bil]

OK, you have completed the cuts and you have a lip and a base.

The best way I have found is to clean off the ragged edges by scraping them with a penknife and feeling along with your hands to make sure that all the bits are removed. Sandpaper doesn't work well and takes forever.

Do be careful. If you are too aggressive or fast, it is possible to crack the plastic as the cut edge is fragile and easily cracked.

[bil]

OK, next step. I use a metal rod resined into a bit of wood to heat up bore holes in the plastic to help it hold together.

I take a discarded pot base and put it upside down. The base is pushed into the lip, and then I use the discarded base like a hat maker uses a weasel to stretch a hat. This forces the lip onto the base so that it is neat, level, and won't easily fall off.

Then I melt about 8 holes in the base to fix them together..

If you ever knock the new pot and the welds break, simply push them back together so that the weld holes match up and work the hot rod in the holes again.

If the holes are made big enough to take a bamboo skewer, then you can stick one into the base of the pot to se how dry that gets

[bethmarie]

Thank you! Wonderful of you to provide such a detailed tutorial. Inspiring, too. Makes me want to go to home depot and shop. Now!

I'd have to buy more than pots; I'd need the cutting tool, and probably a torch to heat up the rod for burning holes. It makes me wonder how much shipping would be for a couple of wide shallow phal-type pots...

Thank you again for the time you invested. I've enjoyed seeing all of your projects. You even inspired me to want to be capably of welding --not a desire I've ever had before!

[dangerouseddy]

id use a jigsaw with a blade for cutting plastic myself, have used a disc cutter and the debris flying off it when cutting something wasn't nice.

[bil]

Originally Posted by dangerouseddy

id use a jigsaw with a blade for cutting plastic myself, have used a disc cutter and the debris flying off it when cutting something wasn't nice.

The huge risk with using a jigsaw is the plastic cracks.

---------- Post added at 08:25 AM ---------- Previous post was at 08:22 AM ----------

Originally Posted by bethmarie

Thank you! Wonderful of you to provide such a detailed tutorial. Inspiring, too. Makes me want to go to home depot and shop. Now!

I'd have to buy more than pots; I'd need the cutting tool, and probably a torch to heat up the rod for burning holes. It makes me wonder how much shipping would be for a couple of wide shallow phal-type pots...

Thank you again for the time you invested. I've enjoyed seeing all of your projects. You even inspired me to want to be capably of welding --not a desire I've ever had before!

I'm trying to remember what mine cost. I think the disc cutter was 100 euros or more, the torch 50 -- 75. You can get cheaper, but I use them a lot, and need to be able to rely on them.

If you really don't want to go to all that trouble, I'll work out what it would cost ROUGHLY, and let you know.

The nice thing about doing it yourself is that a) you gain skills, and b) when the dust settles you still have the tools!

[cjm3fl]

Very nice and informative!

I have a new Dremel and I might look into giving this project a whir...on a smaller scale.

[bil]

Originally Posted by cjm3fl

Very nice and informative!

I have a new Dremel and I might look into giving this project a whir...on a smaller scale.

I have a dremel. No way would mine cut those pots. Perhaps yours will if it is a lot more powerful than mine.