The Final Week

Fiber Composites

For the last week of How to Make Almost Anything, the assignment is to use a 3D mold to make a fiber composite of it. For this week, I decided to make a jewelry dish for my dorm. I used a small, shallow bowl in order to this.

The process for making the composites is pretty simple but involves a lot of layers. The first step is to wrap the 3D mold by a release layer. I wrapped the bowl in about 3 layers of saran wrap.

Next, I took 3 layers of the cloth, cut in circles approximately the size of the bowl, and coated them with the epoxy and hardener mix. In a cup, I mixed 2 pumps of epoxy per 1 pump of hardener than stirred it with a wooden stick. Then I poured this onto each layer of cloth and used a green platic wedge to spread the mixture onto the cloth. You want to leave on just enough mixture so that when you press into the cloth with the green plastic, a little bit of the mixture still seeps out.

After placing the pieces of cloth onto the bowl, I made a saran wrap layer with holes in it using the spiky roller thing we had in lab. Then, I placed the hole-y saran wrap on top of the cloth layers.

The next two layers were the cotton breathing layer and then a final release layer of saran wrap on top of that.

The final step, before leaving the layers to dry is to place the layers in a vaccuum bag to dry. Since my bowl was small enough, I was able to use the the food saver bags to vacuum seal my bowl.

After leaving my bowl to dry for over 12 hours, I peeled of the layers of my bowl. Because the cloth pieces I cut out were slighlty too large and flapped oer the edges of the bowl, Daniel helped me to use the belt sander to release the layers from my bowl.