Research
For the research part, I met with Huang Ayi individually and asked about her detailed daily routine. I found that Huang Ayi has strong aesthetics consciousness. She loves to decorate her own room like putting a small vase with flower on her table. Also, she told me something about the cleaning equipments. She mentioned that every cleaning lady from one to six floor in NYUSH has their own trailer provided by school. However, Ayis above 6th floor do not have a trailer! When a bucket is filled with water, it gets much heavier. In this case, carrying the bucket by holding it in hands becomes a great problem! A trailer would largely increases her efficiency and saves energy.
References
This week we also found that if we put water bottles as the fence of the trailer, it does not look so well and it still looks like trash. Instead, we found a reference online that we can actually utilize the remaining bottle cap to shape the fence and we can put them in unique color combinations to make a good decoration. 1. https://www.pinterest.com/pin/56928382783683802/ 2. https://www.pinterest.com/pin/70437479809150/
Collecting & Molding
Thanks a lot to Ayis help, we collected approximately 200 bottle caps from NYUSH's garbage recycling station. And we found another 100 at a bubble tea shop. We shredded all these bottle caps by using the shredder and then put them in the mold. By baking them at a temperature of 200, the plastics got melted after about 45 minutes. We compress it immediately by using the oil jack and found that the outcome only achieve half thickness of the mold. Therefore, we shredded more bottle caps and covered them on the original piece. By repeating this process, we got a 13mm thick brick in the end (fulfills our requirement)! And it is ready to be cut now!
Prototyping
After getting two HDPE bricks, we drew the sketch for our product and calculated all the parameters. Then, we represented our sketch in Illustrator. Under the guidance of Andy, we first-time manipulated the CNC Machine and successfully cut the bracket and the wheel. The process is very educating, the first time using such a machine is really fun and surprising. After sanding, the components are ready to combined.
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