Week 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.
![papercap](../images/papercap.jpg)
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.
![mold](../images/11mold.jpg)
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.
![vacuum](../images/11vacuum.jpg)
Here starts the learning: EPS is not strong enough to keep the shape in a strong vacuum.
![vacuum2](../images/11vacuum2.jpg)
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.
![demolding](../images/11demolding.jpg)
I also learned that the edges of the composite can be sharp.
![sharp](../images/11sharp.jpg)
We learned propably the best use for the product:
![bestuse](../images/11bestuse.jpg)
In finalizing the product the scissors and Dremel seemed a bit inadequate. I needed a little more power:
![finalizing](../images/11finalizing.jpg)
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!
![ready](../images/11ready.jpg)