This Wednesday, December 19th, we’re presenting the work and research we did this fall during our residency at Waag Society on the meshy project. If you can’t make it there is a stream produced by KillerTV, and if you can make it, there are some drinks ;)
Date: 19 December 2007, 8 pm.
Location: Theatrum Anatomicum, Waag Society, Nieuwmarkt 4, 1012 CR, Amsterdam.
My little epoxy shop was finally up and running, working like a charm and heading for great success until… well until I ran out of epoxy and went to the shop to find out they DIDN’T ORDER ANY NEW AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!!! I only produced 1/3 of the total needed amount so had no choice but to look for alternatives… Fast curing alternatives, cause time was running out. I found a semi-rigid urethane that had a few good points and a few bad ones. Good points: with a little accelerator added (so-cure) it cures in a few hours and is de-moldable in 1 hour! It is semi-rigid, so it is super easy to handle. Bad points: it is yellow :( and not as transparent as the epoxy… In the end I think the speed of production won from the yellow and I got myself 2 liters of urethane, some so-cure and a proper release agent. The shop is back in action.
All the nodes are now complete! Last batch was done 4 at a time in a brainless repeat mode enjoying the fume from the melting lead…
After the first disastrous attempt at making a cast, I switched from silicone to epoxy. Epoxy becomes solid very gradually so I would have time to wait until it was semi-solid, then paste it into the mold, push the 2 parts together and let it dry. This way I would not have to pour anything through any holes, and the material would be thick enough to be able to spread it over the mold by hand. The only big disadvantage of epoxy is that it takes AGES to harden completely. I got good advice from the FormX shop in Amsterdam. They told me to use a moderate heat to speed up the process. Epoxy is very heat sensitive and with a temperature of +- 40 degrees Celsius things would go a lot faster.
Another mass soldering post, this one less skeptical since the procedure has been drastically optimized and this time 4 beautiful boards saw the light! Once again in the midst of a whirlwind of chaos but resulting in a little garden with 4 shiny noise emitting flowers.
Today we did a session of meshy mass soldering. The hardware design is final and the honorable job of reproducing it at least 8 times has commenced. Optimized approach will render about 2 boards in one session (the session length is still under debate and so is the optimized approach). This part of the project is very zen but the table on which it all took place bares very little evidence of this.
