During Week 7's lab we tried both methods that we came up with during Week 6. First we tried laser cutting the shape into the sheet of plastic. The result wasn't bad, the shape was quite accurate which was good. However, the edges of the samples ended up being very irregular because of the effects of the laser on the plastic. Later on we tried our second method: cutting the shape with an x-acto knife. This method turned out to be the most ideal one, since the samples cut had the desired shape and their edges were regular and clean.
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| Figure 7.a: Laser Cutting our New Mold |
To follow our new method, we needed to come up with a way to make a regular, flat sheet of each batch of our plastic. To achieve this, we made a new mold with three pieces of acrylic: a simple rectangle that acts as a base, a frame that the plastic will be poured into, and a second smaller rectangle that takes up some of the frame's inner area in order to reduce the volume of plastic that would go to waste after cutting the samples.
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| Figure 7.c: Plastic in the New Mold |
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Figure 7.b: Cooking Batch of Plastic
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