Originally Posted by
beeman_mccheyne
yeah.. 7500 frames is a pretty small number.
Deviant - you could go with 8 frames for the honey supers, and drone sized cells to maximize storage per box (as long as you use a queen excluder - nobody wants tons of those lazy couch potatoes eating the goods). Also for your design, you might want to stiffen up those frame "ears" as I've seen a lot of the commercially available plastic frames breaking at that point.
"You could find someone with a large 3d printer that could print you out one just for testing purposes but that would also be costly."
diyengineer - I'm not sure what 3d plotters are capable of these days, but I played with one 6 years back and it came out pretty brittal. The frames need to withstand some abuse in the extraction machine. There is a cheap plotter out there though for the DIY.. $1200 or something (search Thing-o-matic youtube) - again - I don't know if it could produce the right quality for testing purposes.
I guess another material that could be used is rubber. I know frame patents have come out on the plastic and metal for the honeycomb frame used in beekeeping. I imagine if rubber were selected it would use roughly the same injection process?
Cheers,
Frazer RM Ross