PEX festival test #2

Well just back from first day building at PEX festival. Everything went well and my newest team member, Mike McGurk was awesome, Thanks Mike! We built half of Zark and tomorrow I will go back and finish. Fist real test of the flexible plywood and everything is looking good.

The Head

Making the head has been a frustrating process of pursuing a line of creation only to end up at a dead end. Well not precisely a dead end. Each line of creation leads to a whole new branch of possibility but not necessarily the solution to my problem which is how to make flat plastic bend into a hemisphere. I made some terrific stuff like this flat hexagonal sheet made from recycled water bottles slightly heated and reformed. Made with a reverse vacuum forming technique. I thought of using a geodesic dome plan to make my patterns but the head is not a regular dome shape but is more elongated along one side. Moving slowly forward. More tests.

Collars

Juri offered to help out and I came up with a great job for him. I want to turn the opening into intricate skylights. During the day the light will shine in through the plastic head and then at night the LED's will illuminate both the plastic head but also the interior. In the prototype (left) the opening is a plain plywood collar but I am starting to design a more intricate opening for the light to shine through.

Useful suggestions

Spent all day calling around looking for materials both here in Philadelphia and also in Boise, Idaho where I will do the final cutting and off site building. Kris suggested that maybe we could use glue and a nail gun to quickly get the panels together; the nails holding long enough for the glue to bond. If it could work it would make it so much stronger and faster to assemble. Excited to go do tests.

First hurdle clear

Well there she blows. We got the prototype up in 1.5 days which i think is pretty good for the first run. We learned a lot about which fasteners worked and which didn't. The hoist system was flawless. It was nice to see that most of our planning went as expected. We will need more reinforcement in some areas but that should be easy enough to fix. We burned it Sunday night and it burned so hot the crowd had to step back from the 30 ft perimeter we had set up. Pretty awesome.