In the midst of living in the Northeast and working at a startup, I would order pizza a lot due to my busy work schedule and solo living situation. I would also often retreat to the mountains for camping and mountain biking escapades and I found myself buying bundles and bundles of firewood logs. It occurred to me one day: my greasy takeout pizza boxes are not recyclable, would if I used them to make logs for firewood for my camp trips? This would be both sustainable and useful to me as the greasy boxes would not be destined to the trash, but rather destined to keep me warm in the woods! The idea was born to create a machine to make logs out of my pizza boxes and the execution of this build was so fun!

I started with a simple design I spun up in Onshape, some 80/20 aluminum extrusion, a bottle jack, and some old PVC pipe. After drilling some holes and milling things down to size, I had a working log press machine. The process was simple: I’d take old/greasy cardboard and shredded paper and let it soak in water for a few days, mixing it occasionally. I’d then put the pulp mixture into the PVC molds, add in the plunger-standoffs, and squish the mixture using the bottle jack. I’d remove the pressed log and after about a week of drying, the homemade logs were ready for the fire.

This design and overall process could definitely be improved by adding an automated mixing device for the pulp, a sliding bottom assembly to eject the finished logs, or by making the construction more compact. In the end though, it was fine for my purposes and was a fun little home engineering project.