16.Wildcard Week_Composite Materials¶
Assignment¶
Design and produce something with a digital fabrication process (incorporating computer-aided design and manufacturing) not covered in another assignment, documenting the requirements that your assignment meets, and including everything necessary to reproduce it.
Heaven is an Half-pipe¶
So…I’m pretty excited about the assignment of this week ‘cause we have chosen to work with composite materials and…nothing is easier to produce than a skateboard deck (<— and here, my friends, it’s were the troubles start!)
There were other possibilities in my mind…a guitar, a surfboard, but in the end…my first love won! (and by the way…I want a freestyle deck since years so this is the right occasion!)
Ok…next move…after having choose what to do we need to decide wich kind of shape we want our deck will have…
And everything start from one single question: “What kind of skate do you want? Standard? Longboard? Freestyle? Dancing? Carver? LDP? Paddle? Freeride? Cruiser? Hybrid? Downhill?…”
(Did I tell you that I Love skateboarding and, more than the sport, the decks??! Ask me about skateboard decks!
Composite materials¶
Well, no more jokes. Composites are made through adding two constituent materials with different properties. After finishing, we will obtain a “new” material with different properties (hopefully better properties than those of individual one).
The individuals componenets are most like fibers. There are many fibers that are different in composition and properties. Some are lighter, some are stronger, some are sensible to particular environmental conditions, some resist to high temperature or chemical elements…using them in wise combination can help us in some jobs like aerospatial or marine industry, construction building, energetic field, etc. etc.
git add aIn this particular case we decided to use wood veener and juta, a long, soft, shiny bast fiber.
Making the mold¶
We decided to use a polistyrene foam to make the mold. Light, cheap, fast to mill…and if something goes wrong with the CNC, you can shape a new one by hand!
### Drawing the shape First thing to do…choose your weapon! At first I wanted to draw a freestyle deck but that kind of skateboard must be very though cause it’s stressed with torsion and a lot of hit. Se, my second choice was t odraw a carver skate to commute around Opendot.
The shape was drawn in Fusion 360 and, starting from that I obtained the female mold (with concave and camber) to use with the vacuum bag and veneers
At a certain point I switched to Rhino6 ‘cause I had some problems in modeling with Fusion
### Milling the mold I exported the toolpaths from Fusion and, after having fixed the foam with some double side tape to the sacrifical baseplate of the Shopbot, I started the job.
After about 2 hours the mold was ready to be removed from the Shopbot.
### Preparing the mold for the thin air press In order to avoid that epoxy resin
Making the deck¶
### Preparing veener, juta and epoxy resin
### Thin air press
### Roarockit.com
Cutting the deck¶
Making the graphic¶
Étienne Jacob Mandala Generetor