It's Kuka Time

I'm really late getting stuff on here this term, insert chuckle since it is Thanksgiving break, but to start off on showing some work, is our advanced digital fabrication section.  With the purchase of a 6 axis Kuka robot arm with tool changer, we have divided our digital fabricatoin class up into teams to approach the research.  Our team has approached the research from an additive approach.

Most digital machining is based on a subtractive process where a block of material is machined down using milling techniques to achieve a desired surface.  The difference in what we are doing is using the robot to apply an addative process where we have settled on a 2 part foam to be applied in layers then selectivley machined away.

With a limited amount of time to get this rolling we had to make a decision fairly quick regarding the material, research pushed toward a soy based foam that was more eco-friendly but in respect of time and the ability to actually talk to people willing to work with us we fell short and ended up going with what we could get quickly and fairly local.

Following are posts of some of our tests.

video of initial foam test  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aBof2ufOFrA

Initial test using Froth-Pak foam, this kit was available from the hardware store for around $40 and available in bulk sizes by freight.  So along with the Great Stuff it was a good place to start

Testing the Great Stuff (canned foam)

Testing the Froth Pak

We found this stuff to work rather well, skinned over within 20 seconds or so, and by the time I made one round (roughly a 30" diamater circle) it was solid enough to support itself

Although we did find that as the material ran out of the small cans the pressure started to decrease and the mixture became speratic and inconsistent with the initial layout.

Ahhhh models

So sweet is the plastics and gypsum. The school has an ABS printer and 2 "starch" printers. One used to be starch and the newer ZCorp 310 is a gypsum plaster printer. It has a bed and it rakes a solid layer of dry plaster across then sprays "binder" across it to make a solid component, then repeats the process layer by layer until you have a completed part. After removal, you can put it in a machine that waxes the plaster to give it strength, and yes it needs it they are rather brittle beforehand. Due to the thin-ness of my piece I chose to run the last iteration through the plastic printer real quick. By real quick I mean 23 hours later it was done. The plaster printers are a lot faster and print a complete cavity in 4-5 hours. (and for a whole lot less money I might add)





This piece was an iteration between the plastic and complete startch print. It was quite a bit bigger and had to be printed in 5 pieces. Pushing the limits of the machine with the thin-ness of the parts I finally had one fail. This one was just too brittle to even glue, it would fail beside the joints I would glue. So I saved a piece just to have an enlarged view of the connections. These were some more iterations on the patterning derived from the polygons. With ideas of the outcome being used for different aspects of a site installation.
ABS print in progress, this was just too cool to leave out.

The eternal Tuesday that started on Friday

So in fitting the requirement to 3d print 5 of these models my project came to a status of problem solving. In the pretend world that engineers / fabricators / contractors etc think that architects live in my project would be fine. But since it is a nice pretty pretend thing the corners all meet at an infinite point where if printed they would all fall apart. So....to solve this in the modeling stage I have to take my model out of digital project, exported at whatever stage of articulation I want to express, import it into Rhino, offset surfaces, then go through a very laborious task of making connection joints so the pieces all stay together and look pretty.


All so I can get these
They are nice connections, swooping into the next plane and following the curves, but geez the time it takes is just dumb