Week 17 assignments | Fabacademy

Wildcard week

Work to be done

  • Design and produce something with a digital fabrication process not covered in another assignments.

Designing

For this week I choosed to work with composite in creating cup shaped container using cardboards.
I started design parts I wanted to cut in FreeCAD.
This part is the bottom of the cup with a radius of 50 mm.
Img: Bottom part
Then I designed the middle part which of the cup with the outer radius of 50 mm and the inner radius of 37 mm.
Img: middle part

After designing I exported the design in corelDrawer for printing them.
Img: Prints

For printing these parts I made some adjustment on settings of the lasser cutter because I was going to print on a cardboard.
Img: Printing window Img: Preferences

This is how the parts was printed.
Img: Printed

Then I assembled all part before doing composite and cutted cloth to be used.
Img: Assembled parts
This is the fabric I used in my composite, it was not a good fabric to use because of the diameter of the cup I have created since it was the only left in our I used it.
Img: cloth

I mixed the resin with a weight ratio of 100A:30B. SO I measured 50 grams of part A to 15 grams of part B to match the ratio described.
After measuring, I mixed the solution quickly before it start to drying.
Img: Resin

Here I first prepared the place I was going to work on to protect it against the composite to stick on it, I placed a plastic film.
Img: Applying 5

Now the next step was to mix the solution before starting applying it to the fabric cloth.
Img: Mixing

I layed down the fabric pieces and started applying the composite solution on them, from the 2 below images it shows how I was applying the solution on the fabric.
Img: Applying 1 Img: Applying 2 After applying the solution to the fabric I would start coating the fabric to the cardboards I cutted.
Img: Applying 7 After coating the outer part, I inserted a fabric inside the cup.
Img: Applying 8 I applied the solution after coating the inside part.
Img: Applying 6

After applying the solution I waited for some hours for the composite solution to dry and harden.
Img: Final result

The result are not good because I didn't use the vacuum bag because it was damaged, and the fabric I used was thick compared to the cup I have cutted, and also the size of the cardboad I cutted was small.

To get a good composite next time I could use a thin fabric in layer like the one used by our local instructor in his work of composite.

If I had used the vacuum bag it could have helped in compressing the fabric against the card board.

File used

Click here to download file used Img: download icon