The Creation of the Cable Car Pod

I made the cable car pod by stitching together wire mesh then covering this with rice paper. We liked the idea of using rice paper over our pod because it would have different levels of opacity, depending on how much rice paper was covering a particular part. This would create different lighting effects and different levels of visibility within the pod, making it a very interesting internally focussed space.

3D printing

Here is our first 3D printed component, the single pulley of our cable car mechanism. Manu mage the nice wooden parts of the pulley in the workshop- everything is coming together very well! 

The size of the 3D printed object is quite large, and the finish is quite rough. Therefore we are considering making our cable car pod small in comparison, so it is the mechanism that is the main part of our design, similar to how in some forms of architecture, e.g. brutalism, it is the structure that is mostly expressed.

Here's our second 3D cut piece, a double pulley. 

Unfortunately, our final 3D cut piece, a hook, did not work. It was too small, and hence very delicate so it broke shortly after being printed. We were informed by Franca that this piece was really too small. We have learnt for next time!

Lantern modification 2

We decided to try modifying our lantern by cutting holes in them and filling them with a lighter, clearer material. This would create windows in our lantern that would then create an experience for the travellers.

3D Printing

Here are photos of the 3D printing that we have done so far. We have one more piece that is still being printed, it will be ready by tomorrow.

The single pulley printed perfectly. The sizes are exactly as we wanted and the file came out just like the 3DS Max 3D model.

Unfortunately, there was an issue with the double pulley. Due to the fact that objects on 3DS Max do not snap (or if they do, we are unaware of this!) and that we working at such a small scale, we did not notice that their must have been a tiny gap between our pieces. Anyway, the consequence of this is that we ended up with 3 separate rings as opposed to a nice double pulley! We now need to consider what we are going to do; whether we can think of a way to join these pieces without using glue (which is forbidden for this design project) or if we just need to fix the file and get this reprinted. Obviously we will have to spend extra for this and 3D printing can be quite pricey... lesson learnt, double, triple, and quadruple check your files!!!

 Here are our three rings all separate!

This is essentially what the pulley would have looked like, if we hadn't had the error with our files!

Hopefully our third piece, which was given to be printed at the same time as these pieces but that is taking a bit longer to print, will be fine!

3DS Max hook

The first on the 3 objects we wish to have 3D printed: a double hook which will clip onto one of our pulleys and also the top string for support.
This looks simple, but I had never modelled on 3DS Max before so it took a bit of figuring out! It's quite fun once you get the hang of it though.
We're hoping to hand this file into the digital fabrication workshop tomorrow, hopefully everything will be OK!

Cable cars

For our second vehicle, we are looking at creating some sort of manually operated cable car spanning between our city site and Waiheke island. Since escape is such a fundamental concept for our hotel designs, we came up with the thought 'how far are you willing to go to escape?' If the site is viewed as dystopian, then the traveller has to exert effort to reach the utopia. Therefore we want our cable car like vehicle to be manually operated, perhaps with a pulley system of some sort.

Transmaterial- SRW Weave

We decided to try weaving together seaweed and rice paper in order to make them slightly stronger than they were on their own. This was a rather time consuming (as we had to be careful not to break the pieces as we were weaving them) yet rewarding experience. However, once we completed the weave we found that although this was stronger than the pieces had been individually, it was still quite brittle and there was nothing to hold the weave in place. Therefore we decided to create a binding backing for it with glue.
Since this is a very lightweight material we feel that it gives us many opportunities to incorporate into one or both of our vehicles.

Lantern modification 1

One of the main issues we found with our prior experience of the lantern, which was confirmed by hearing feedback from the other groups, was that the lantern tilting caused it to combust. Therefore we thought of including tails to the lantern, similar to the tails on a kite which act as stabilisers. We thought that this would have the double purpose of stabilising and also making the lantern appear like a giant, floating jellyfish.

We decided to change the lantern to red for aesthetic purposes- the red of the lantern and the green of the seaweed complement each other. We also decided to try stitching the seaweed to the lantern instead of using tape; this should give it a stronger hold.

Here is a video of our lantern flying attempt. Unfortunately I was away the first week and the weather the second week was rather unacceptable for flying a lantern. I did try to light it a few days, but the first time it didn't work and the second time I got told off... ^^; Therefore, since it has been very windy I decided to test whether the lantern would work using wind as it's uplift force. This does work, however of course wind is renewable and a very changeable force. Hopefully I will be able to find a day and place where it will be suitable to light it soon.

First Lantern Flight Attempt

This is probably the most disastrous experience that Studio L.I.M. has had so far! We learnt that even a tiny breeze (we purposefully moved to the sheltered car park, not only for fire safety reasons but also for protection from the wind) can really affect the way the lantern blows and the difficulty in getting a flame to start. We found that paraffin burns very effectively once going, but that it is quite difficult to start it off. Our lantern did fly briefly, although as demonstrated in the video it quickly got out of hand as a sudden gust of wind blew the lantern sideways (into me!) We were very happy that we had decided to tie a string to it before lighting the paraffin, as not doing this would have been very dangerous as it would have flown away and possibly set something else alight. We have learnt that as the lantern currently is, it needs to be lit under very controlled conditions, on a completely calm day. Safety first! Here are some photos of our experience: 

We had some volunteers from other teams helping us. We'd like to thank them for this.

The victim: there's now a hole in my skirt where a bit of ash fell on it! Thank goodness it wasn't anything more!

The culprit: our sadly burnt out lantern. Fortunately, on the advice of our tutors earlier in the day, we bought more than one so have spares sitting in our lockers for later attempts.