documentation-week8

Marjolijn suggested that maybe I could do more tests with different shapes. I had already made a small ball before, but I still wondered if the effect is the same with a larger shape.

During the vacuum forming process, Asle and I found out that heating a PET plate with a thickness of 1 mm for 17 seconds gave the best results. Under 17 seconds you get rounded edges instead of sharp edges.

Although the polystyrene balls are painted, they still become static. But online, Styrofoam balls are also available in other colours. We tried and tested it ourselves, but I don't think it's necessary to reinvent the wheel.

//The struggle of a box by Asle

My goal was to make a vortex gun that had som visual quality as well as practical. Hence the hexagon shape.. But that little twist have made so many problems for me making wise. It takes so little time make everything in the shape of a square. Makerbox - define sixes - wupti. And too be honest I didn't think of the hexagon being more than just a little 'manioulation' with the basic drawings from a square. What does create lots of problems are the corners.. To make them meet nice and even as on the first picture (where it wasn't glued together) was absolutely possible. The thing is it only looked good from on side at a time. Without ever having understood completely why one crookedness, bad measurement or me fooling around in illustrator led on to another.

Together with time pressure due to lack of available lasers and only timeslots at absolutely not well fitting time of day, I made things in a rush. By know I have approximately the pieces for three hexacon boxes printet but with slight changes that makes the two remaining unusefull. Sad in every way.

On reason is e.g. that the drawings from Makerbox are automatically made with slight rounded corners. I didn't knew in the beginning at just cut what I thought to be the corners without zooming enough. That created small differences but only 0,2-4 mm in every corner was enough to turn it all bad. Eventually I found out - but not after having 'fixed' these minor differences subcontious without knowing what I did -> eventually leading to even more differences when I couldn't seperate the ones I had tried to fix vs the ones that where in there original length.

Here you see the inner 'slider' that's going to work as the membrane/drum skin that was on the quick 'n' dirty version. Instead of regular elastics I would go with the ones used on bikes to give it a certain power. At this point I'm still worried about weather the construction and the 4 mm MDF is going to be strong enough. I guess I will find out in one way or another.

And why PDF? The material everybody loves to hate (but still uses). WEll, it's far from exiting but it's easy to handle, even and least but not last cheap. Whereas other parts of our collaborative project has been about materials themselves and how they react to static electricity e.g. For this particular making MDF is choosen for being practical. Not ugly - and eventually it's going to be all covered in this case (hehe) - but practical.

..and imagine me having screewed up something expensive three times.. Oh Lord.. ;)

The thing about a plate that has to go through a closed space pushing air in front of it is that it really would like to turn.. To prevent this I made small 'legs' that only had make the 'slider' go smooth through the chamber.

Of course they were not strong enough themselves why they needed a bit support. If it's enough time will tell...

How to attach elastics to an MDF plate?
Also wanting the opportunity to change the lenght and strengh of the elastics I found my answer at the bottom of a drawer in the Makers Lab

Here you see the crookednes in the corner. The whole structure is 55 cm long andin the pursuit of making everything fit - something will get crooked. Quite ironic. But as soon one place is in position another has lefts it's own..

I figured that I might have misdone something that had to do with the size of the end piece and the thickness of the material. This is from the first try but even shrinking the piece 4 mm in total (the crookedness was 2 mm at each side) it didn't change much why I eventually ended up closing the small holes with 'latex joints' to make it more air tight.

Here is the inside of the box with it's red elastics and handle

The little and simple solution I'm the most proud of is actually the lock of the handle. My aim was to make this without any screws and as ajustable as possible (since I don't even know whether this kind of vortex gun is going to work..)

My starting point was therefore to makes things that seperately could be improved and replaced. Thissolution with the handle is though not going to be changed. I made small cones from a wooden stick and stuck the tape through. The friction when pulled makes it stick and then without the use of any forces one can just change it. Brilliant if I have to say so (and since I'm writing this nobody can stop me from doing so ;))

I accidently sacrificed several white t-shirts during the making of this ;) It's messy and smelly - but so nice to get your hands into something.

A little lesson I have taken from this week is that whatever you are making on your computer - you always have to fix it in some way with your hands. There is always something turning up differently than you would expect!

Painting the styrofoam balls was more difficult than expected. The balls are so light that they fly away while spraying. To prevent this we sprayed the balls in a plastic bag. After that we shook the bag for a while. The balls are colored but started to stick together. After drying the balls theyt can be separated from each other but it is a lot of effort. Although I used a lot of paint the balls are not fully colored.This gives the balls an organic look. It almost seems as if there is zoomed in on bacteria. Now the question is if the balls can still become static despite the paint.

PLANNING OF THE COAT & EXPERIMENTATION WITH THE BIOPLASTIC / Neža

/ vacuuming the bioplastic

Before vacuuming the bioplastic itself, it was necessary to make the mould. And since I wanted to have something matching with the coat I was planning on making and concept we created, I made the mould a bit more organically shaped and decided would be better than incorporating the basic shapes, since we already had spheres all over the place.

I decided to make it from leftover wood and use both, the laser cutter forms and also the frame itself, and in that way try it both. First I measured the size of the plate on the vacuum machine and afterwards the mould itself, so it was of the correct size for the vacuum former.

I left the vacuum heating for 7 seconds and afterwards the bioplastic was sticking to the wood really hardly so I left it for 2 days and took it apart later. Apparently the bioplastic had to dry again, but at the end the result was really well formed, except the texture was clearly visible and formed by the wood.

/ don't use wooden mould but plexiglass glass one or objects with smooth texture, so the bioplastic forms smoothly over it

One of the experiments also included a smaller piece of bioplastic, which I wanted to form but since the material needs to be airtight all over the vacuum plate, I used the tape around to achieve that. After all everything melted and the bioplastic became so soft that it wasn't able to form again since it got holes and consequently loosing its airtight element.

I have made few pictures in photoshop based on our colour card and structure of the coat and decided to give it a try with the UV printer which at first didn't work very well but I figured that since the bioplastic is very wrinkly, the UV printer detects different height so that is why it prints unevenly and at the end the picture wasn't visible.

/ UV printing the bioplastic

/ best way to get the result is to print one layer of white and one layer of colour with setting the right height!

After making of the pattern for the coat and sewing the coat out of the real fabric, in final version; I have decided to make it just out of calico to see the fit and whether the pattern is finalised well and everything is matching. Since the fit was great I decided to proceed with making of the coat in final fabric.

COLLABORATIVE LEARNINGS

/ we agreed on painting the balls for the sake of experimentation, and since we decided on the colour card previous week we could proceed with that
/ we decided on the colour card very coherently and without any struggles so that's why was also easier to proceed with further experimentation of colours
/ overall we worked quite separately this week since Asle was developing his vortex gun, Neža was developing the coat and experimenting with UV printer and bioplastic vacuum forming and Melissa was forming the shapes
/ even though we worked separately we gave each other feedback during the week and worked within one working space so was easy to coherently develop ideas and make preparations for the expo