Week 3: Digital Work

Elevations

The work for the creation of the vacuum formed piece started by figuring out the 3d model in a few different ways. The first was coming up with a form that would work mechanically, so as to test two of the joining conditions of our previous flower model. So as you can see from the elevations, we added smaller scale ribbing to try to make certain parts of the piece inflexible, as well as provide ways for separate parts to nestle together.

Perspective views


Sections

The sections, especialy the one on the right, show the main pinch. This pinch allows all of the rest of the flower to delaminate and form other spaces, and to expand into blooming petals. This is the crux of our project. So we tried to make it tight enough to allow for the stuff being pinched to push back on it and then some of the ribs would lock everything into place (the second and third colored perspectives shows this area the best). This didn't work exactly as we expected, but we learned a lot about how vacuum formed plastic works (we'll get into this on the next post). The sections then were vital to get everything to fit together, and will continue being the starting point for any modeling we do.

Exploded Axon

This axon shows how there are various forces at work within the piece. There is the internal pressure of the green piece (lovingly nicknamed Allie), which pushes against the pinching pressure of the pink and purple piece. You'll notice in this drawing that we actually milled the purple piece to be curved into the pink piece. This was to pressurize the fitting between the two, which would be a series of bumps, sort of like on a blister pack you find at the grocery store. Neither of these two joints worked out. We ended up scrapping the purple piece altogether and using two of the pink pieces. The bumbs didn't work when we tried to mill them, and ended up applying them afterward.

Budding Diagram

We call our revised bumps 'buds' because of the way they grow out of a surface, similar to how a bud forms on a tree branch. The bud is formed by heating up the plastic with a heat gun and depressing the back of a drill bit into it once the plastic becomes, well, more plastic. Then, a notch is cut into the side of it, so that a hole drilled into the connecting piece of plastic can slide over the bud and be pulled tight against it. See the photo stream below for pictures of gloved hands and a floating heat gun working on this process.