LESSON TEME: Composites

  In this week, I tried to harden a skateboard by using several types of clothes (cotton materials) with epoxy resin. I'm going to make an electric skateboard for my final product. So I cut out several shapes of skateboards by using a shopbot shown in Figure[1]. The board is also molded the text "Fab Academy 2016.4.24" [2]. I used one of the skateboards for this week assignment. The picture below this article is the skateboard enclosed by the clothes with epoxy resin. Video [1] shows the resin works.

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[1] Wood Cutting by Using Shopbot
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[2] 3D Molding by Using Shopbot
[1] Appearace Epoxy Resin Works

Curing a Scateboard Surfacce by Pieces of Cloth with Epoxy Resin

  I used several materials to harden the skateboard. At the first step, I cut clothes to be able to adequately enclose the skateboard. The second step was to make many holes on cling films. I prepared two films to enlcose the skateboard with clothes. These holes had a role to pass through epoxy resin when the following setep of vacuuming process. There are two types of resin of epoxy resin. I mixed them by ratio for 5:1. Then, I pasted epoxy resin to these clothes and enclosed skateboard again. The video below this article shows appearence of the pasting process. After the process, I enclosed the skateboard by the cling films I made holes, and then I also enclosed them by two towels. These towels had a role to absorb the resin passing through the holes on the cling films. Lastly, I enclose them by another cling films which had a role to avoid to stick the rasin with a plastic bag for vacuuming process. In the vacuuming process, I tried several times to vaccum the air in the plastic bag because the bag contained air after the vacuuming. I used masking tape to keep not to enter the air in the bag but it's difficult to completely keep out the air.

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[2] Overall Image
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[3] Enclosing Clothes
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[4] Making Holes
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[5] Pasting Epoxy Resin to Clothes
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[6] Enclosing Towel with Skateboard
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[7] Vacumming Process

Refine Skateboard

  I disclose towels from the board [8] and remove several fragments of resin [9]. Finally, I got the harden skateboard [10].

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[8] Disclosing Towels from Skateboard
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[9] Refine Skateboard
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[10] Complete!