Assignment: Make 3D with fiber materials.

Actuallly I didn't have any clues what I should make with fiber materials on that wednesday. It's first time for me to make fiber materials and the process is really complex. But after seeing some last year's assignments, I understood bascially it can make the materials be stronger than before. So it's good for using thin wood, banboo and something like thin stuff. For the assignments, first I wanna make a hat with linen, but after my friend's result of composites, I tought it's not good material for hat, so I changed it to a pair of sandals. Also I didn't want to make normal (boring) sandals, so I tried to make my own sandals based on Japanese sandals (Geta).

Generally the form is like this.

And I want to use it as a pair of sandals on a beach, so I changed it little bit like this.

Because of the cat footprint, when I walk on the beach, the cat footprints will appear on the sand. I think it's little bit stupid and funny sandals and I was not sure it's possible to make it with composites, but I'd like to try it.

To use composite materials, in FabLab Barcelona we have a big vacuum machine. The process is that first design the 3D model like in molding and casting lecuture, mill the foam with the milling machine, then put the fiber materials and paste resin on it, cover with the plastic sheet and put it on the vacuum machine. Keep it over 3 hours and after that we can take the composites.

If you want, you can use any fabric materials, but to make beautiful surface with the composites, the softer material, the better result. So normally we use soft materials like linens. Here is the result. After vacuuming, I will make holes to attach strings.

In conclusion, I think I will use this technichs when I wanna make something that is thin, but it's needed to be hard. So far I can imagine it's like skate board, bowl for food, hat, wings for wind and water and pencase... well, I remembered basically when we use the composites, the things gonna be hard.

So here is the result. Actually I pasted only 1 or 2 linen sheets, so some parts are weak and it's little bit dirty, but even it works well so far.

Yes, It works! XD

You can download Geta Files here. convert it to stl and milling it!

.blender