Charles Fracchia

Making a panel for the Icosahedron

The goal was to experiment with making a OSP, linen composite as a replacement for one panel on the icosahedron built for Week 7: Make Something Big

  • Vacuum bag setup

    I set up the part to be left within the layers of fiber composite. I used 2 layers on either side of the triangle.

  • Getting the letters

    One of the key features of this part is that is contained my name and I wanted the resulting piece to have small depressions on the letters. I therefore made sure that I pressed in the letters when starting to apply the vacuum to ensure that the name would be visible in the resulting part. In this picture, you can just about make out my first name.

  • Resulting piece

    I set up the part to be left within the layers of fiber composite. I used 2 layers on either side of the triangle.

  • Name finish

    The name turned out well. It cannot be seen in this picture but the amount of resin I applied on each layer was small enough to allow good translucency thorugh the name. Remember that I put LEDs inside the icosahedron to pulsate soothingly when someone walks in front of the artifact.

  • Piece on the icosahedron

    This picture is just to show the rough finish color that the composite has. If I remake this part, I would use foam as the core for the part as it would make the overall assembly much lighter. However, the amount of time necessary to make the materials for a full icosahedron is likely to be too large to be worth it. It would indeed require me to make a minimum of 15 parts (for the "coming out of the ground" look).