Fab Academy 2015Week 12. Composite week. This week shoved me there is no such a small job, you couldn't learn a lot. First I thought I could make a baseball cap of one peace in a way the head peace being soft. To see how it would work I manually designed a paper model. I needed quite a lot of darts. The sun block would need darts too. It felt somewhat complicated at the first try, so I decided to do something simpler.
So I put a screw on a piece of wood, stuck a peace of foam in it, tilted it against the hot wire and rotated. Now there is two sided mold for a fruit bowl.
We used two layers of burlap and SAP1000. We put red perforated plastic on both sides of composite and regular plastic on both sides the installation to protect the vacuum machine.
Here starts the learning: EPS is not strong enough to keep the shape in a strong vacuum.
Perfored plastic is not enough to get the product easily out of the molds. It's stuck and mold comes out in little peaces with a lot of force.
I also learned that the edges of the composite can be sharp.
We learned propably the best use for the product:
In finalizing the product the scissors and Dremel seemed a bit inadequate. I needed a little more power:
The final product, however, is beautiful! It's wrinkly and brown. And it stands quite nicely up even though the vacuum rounded the bottom a little bit. It can also be used on its side, fruits coming out of it like it would be the cornucopia . This exercise showed material much more flexible than paper when placing the layers. I think the cap would have been doable after all. This material excites me, after seeing the result, I think this kind of composite would make an excellent loud speaker cone! I wish, I had more time with this!
