11 Composites

Jeff Putney
Tue, 28 Apr 2015 21:14:43 GMT

This week I attempted to make a composite frisbee out of cotton and epoxy. I started by tinkercading up a frisbee model.
I then used a Shapeoko to mill foam insulating board(the pink stuff form home depot) into my frisbee mold shape. MeshCAM was used to run the machine and I was able to cut at the fastest speed possible because I was using not very dense insulating foam board.
Next I cut stips of stiff cotton into small square that could fold around the curves of the frisbee shape.
We didn't have a perforating roller to I used a small screw driver to perforate my release layers.
I then covered the mold with a sheet of release film and tried to apply 3 layers of cotton and epoxy over the entire mold.
This was covered by another layer of perforated release film and felt to that vacuum could be pulled on the stack.
I used a shopvac to pull vacuum on the stack and then sealed it off with a hot air gun. The kind of worked but ended up leaking over time. I think a proper vacuum bag sealing device would have fixed this problem.
The bad didn't hold vacuum over night but the shape still held pretty well
The final object looked ok but was much for flexible then expected, next time I would try using many more layers of fabric.
In the end I think I just made a crappy plate that you probably shouldn't eat off of.

Design Files

STL of the frisbee can be downloaded here.