Week 14 — Composite

Bike bottle holder

For this assignment I decided to make a bottle holder for my bike. I thought it's a good application of the composite assignment cause of the lightness and resistance that can be achived with this technique (and cause my old bottle holder is broken). The plan is to mill 2 side of a cilinder with foam in order to get a template and to lasercut the jute in order to get the shape of the bottle holder.

The shape

I made the shape of the bottle holder going through some step:
1 • First of all I drew a cylinder with the diameter of a plastic bottle (65mm);
2 • Then I drew the profile of the bottle holder on the front view;
3 • I extruded this polyline in order to intersect it with the cylinder;
4 • Finally I splitted the cylinder with the extrusion and deleted the unwanted parts










Lasercutting the textile

As textile I decided to use the jute, in order to lasercut it I had to make the shape I created previously flat, fortunately there is an easy command in Rhinocheros called Unroll surface. I decided to use 4 layers, and make a renforcement of other 4 layers just where the screws are screwed in.





The foam template

I wanted a template with in relief the shape of the bottle holder. This helps when you put the the jute layers (but maybe was better to engrave this parts, insted of the relief). Cause of the cylindrical shape of the template I had to split the template in half and put some tabs to keep in place the parts.

Milling model (stl)




Material: Foam (300x300x60mm)
Rough toolpath: End mill (6mm)
Finishing toolpath: Nose mill (6mm) - 1.5 mm overlay on x and y





Make the composite

I put together the two half parts of the template with toothpick and wrapped it around with cellophan.



Then I prepared the resin, mixing it with the catalyst (25%). After that I started to place the textile layers on the tamplate, spreading the resin on each one with the brusher.







The result

The final piece looks good, probably using a template with the guidelines engraved would be better.









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