Testing the materials

When we got the direction in which we should move, we went for the materials straight away. We got a styrofoam and a woodglue, but we couldn’t find a kaasdoek so replaced the it with bandage roll.

First thing we needed to build the shape from the styrofoam. We cut it into small squares  of 3 different sizes so it would be smaller to the top. After we stack it one on another with a double sided tape, so we could fix some imperfections in the process:

When we got our shapes formed we needed to stick them with some glue, because double sided tape doesn’t hold it perfectly. We tried the super glue, but it started dissolving the styrofoam. We also had a hot glue gun, so tried with that and it worked good enough, the only concern was we needed to keep the temperature of the glue not to hot, because it also was melting the styrofoam.

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As a result our shapes were holding together really good. But they were angular and we wanted to go for more smooth rounded shape. And our favourite school has a machine to cut the styrofoam. Thus we formed our first shape painless and quick.  It was late evening so we had to finish everything at home.

At home we didn’t have a machine obviously and we had to improvise. We decided to made a cutting machine by ourself.  We just needed some energy supply some wood and a wire. Luckily from the useless machine we had some isolated wires left at home and for the cutting string we used the spring from the pen.  It was fun experience and we almost didn’t get hurt (just a light burn on a finger:P).

After 2 batteries died we still didn’t finished to curving our shapes, so we needed to think how to shape them in a different way. And it appeared that nt cutter works perfectly for shaping the styrofoam.

When we got our shapes smooth it was time to make them hard. Patrick told that we had to dilute the wood glue with water  and soak the fabric into it. After some research we found the proportion of the water to a glue and started  putting it on our shapes.

After few days they dried nicely and were quite hard, so it was quite promising. But then we tried to sand all the bumps away and we didn’t succeeded with making  it very  smooth and it was quite a big disappointment.

So we came to conclusion that it is possible to build this installation in a size we wanted on the beginning, but it won’t look as good as we wanted. And we will need to put a lot of time and effort in it, what may be not the most feasible idea to build.   So we needed to think of another installation and this time take into a consideration how we are going to build it.

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