Making tiles from plastic bottles

PET bottles or beer kegs can be used to make transparent tiles. This free roofing material will be very useful when building a greenhouse. They can also cover any outbuildings.

What you will need:

• PET bottles;
  
• mounting hair dryer;
  
• profile pipe 20x20 mm.

The process of making tiles

The essence of tile production is that a sheet is cut out of a PET bottle, then it is drawn between profile pipes and shrink-fitted with a hair dryer. As a result of heating, it will take the shape of pipes, thereby obtaining characteristic waves. To shrink the sheets, you will need to weld a machine from pipes. It looks like a coffee table with side rails, between which the crossbars slide.
Using a knife and then scissors, you need to cut an even sheet from a bottle or beer keg.

It is secured to the machine frame using a screw-on crossbar.

Then the sheet is passed between the pipes and pressed against the last of them with clamps through the rail.

The sheet is heated with a mounting dryer, first on one side of the machine, then on the reverse.

After this it is removed. The result is a small wavy tile.


If you feed the sheet through 2 tubes, the waves will be wider and the tile itself will be larger. However, with this method, the tightening of the plastic along the edges of the waves occurs more strongly.

Finished tiles can be nailed onto a roof with a continuous sheathing. For greenhouses, when transparency is important, the sheets are fastened together with blind rivets.

To prevent the plastic from tearing, homemade washers made of thin sheet metal or scrap metal profiles are placed on the back side of the rivets.

Watch the video