16. Wildcard week.¶
For the wildcard week Henk advised us to keep it simple, and work with composites. So that’s what we did.
Group assignment
I teamed up with the interns, Hazal and Farah.
We carefully read the datasheet of the epoxy tarbender, found we needed 2 parts on 1 in the mix, and subsequently - after donning the safetymask, goggles and labcoat- mixed the right amount.
We used a mold that was left behind by a former student, and covered it with layers of cloth and bubbleplastic. Then we made a vacuum in the bag, and put it aside for the 16 hour needed for setting.
Then me and Rafah (who needs photocredits for some of these) continued with another object, this time a piece of foam we tried to shape ourselves.
We used the hot wire cutter for it, but time and again the wire broke, so I ended up cutting a crude photocamera by hand. Same procedure as above, except this time we did remember to cover the mold in plastic before spreading the epoxy.
Another 16 hour wait, which in my case turned out in a few days wait.
Individual assignment
I started looking for interesting objects to make in my old Blendersuite, made two based on Franz Xaver Messerschmidt’s ‘character heads’, especially imagining them to be in a vaccuum bag, but realized they were nice but not a good fit for an epoxyjob. Thanks again anyway, Sketchfab.
Then I caught Blender shortsightedness I guess, because I imported the Kicadfile of my Hello D11C programmer, turned it into a 3d object, exported that to an stl file, and subsequently spent a long morning today trying to figure out how to export that to something either the shopbot (which was busy luckily because it still scares me) or the lasercutter could work with. Which was, of course, as Michelle delicately pointed out, the file I imported into Blender to begin with…
So off I went on the lasercutter, for the second time in all these weeks, and it was fun even though I had it cut a cardboard nonsensical thing since the toolpaths were cut as well.
With more mistakes than I find the energy to mention (all involving handling filesize, placement, etc.) I succeeded in making a giant pcb, the top one. I did not know what to do with the ‘negative’ this time, so I threw those away in the end.
Once that was glued to a yellow cardboard and a wooden plank I thought I was ready to epoxify, but I had not taken into account the water-like quality of the material, so after consulting Henk and Michelle I found I needed to make a box around my object. And I spent the rest of the day battling the file issues again, this time with an acrylic plate as material.
I cut everything to the right size, but pouring I will have to do another time. I already like my giant pcb, and hope it will get nicer, still.
update: I removed the wood, and will try and pour everything on the Organza I wrapped around it. Too much work, the other thing.
So I put the epoxy
