Saturday, March 20, 2010

And more new solutions

Excited to employ our new tool, and after a few hours tracking down the best way to adhere the styrofoam (rubber cement), we start covering the bowl.

There she is. Notice the gaps we filled in with expanding foam. We thought that was a brilliant idea.

Until it wouldn't yield to the hot wire knife. (But check out the contraption Jon built to make the perfect curve!)

How about car battery powered steel cable? (Notice the heat gun already cast aside.)

To be fair, it did make some impact before catching on fire.

Getting more rudimentary.

And more desperate.


And back to the basics: turkey knife, sanding block, and vacuum. The best, and apparently only way, to make a compound curve.

Sunday, March 14, 2010

A new solution

Looking around on the web for solutions, I found a guy that used a soldering gun to make a hot wire knife. "I've got one of those." I thought. Out to the garage. I removed the tip and added some 10 guage copper wire. We won't be able to do the whole bowl profile at once. But we can make many different wire loops that correspond to different parts of the bowl.  It will take many passes. But it should work. We'll also need to make a moveable jig to connect the gun to the template accurately. Fingers are crossed. We'll report after next weekend.

Failure

Tried to make the hot wire template for cutting the outside of the (soon to be covered in foam) bowl. I thought that the best thing would be to run a single hot wire around the bowl to cut the shape evenly. So I used a template that was 1/2 an inch smaller than the finished size of the outside of the bowl. Using screws as standoffs I attached a bandsaw blade. Bringing us back to the final template shape. Connected to a car battery charger and it got hot. Hot enough to cut foam except the blade expanded when it got hot and deformed. Couple of hours work with only a lesson in metal dynamics to show for it.