Collaboration Project Master Post: UFBowl

This project was a wild ride from start to finish!

We all started off with talking about and listing off our 'goats' and refined it down to one idea that we could all agree on (yay democracy!). The idea that we all agreed on was that we were tired of dropping our hot bowls.

We constrained our initial designs within a list of requirements - to help us keep on track with what we needed. We needed to consider the various shapes and sizes of the bowl, food safe materials, heat resistance, hand protection and that it needed to be microwaveable. We also decided that it should be a multi-functional product under the premise of whats the point of buying something you can use a dishcloth or sleeve to simply solve?

We tossed around several ideas varying from a crochet loop-esque oven mitt attachment and tongs. Eventually we settled on a spiral design, it could accommodate for various different bowl sizes and shapes, be made of appropriate materials and be transformable into a place-mat when the device is set back down onto a flat surface.

 

Prototyping started with Brandon making a very rough version out of foam core just to bring the general gist of the thing into the physical realm. I focused on seeing weather or not the actual spiral would work and support any weight at all. 

My first version was done at 5 inches diameter and 25% infill for expedience, and with my trusty bottle of IPA it seemed that our spring would work.

After figuring out that this all worked, Brandon whipped up an amazing model that i then took to the printers. 

I ended up printing the absolute beast of a spiral in PLA with 100% infill and a diameter of about 6.5 inches

After this was printed we still wanted it to be the teal colour, so I primed it with black plasti-dip, painted it and gave it a good ol' spray with some pearlescent plasti-dip to A: make it shiny and B: to simulate the feeling and grip of silicone. I do think that the plasti-dip helped with the overall springyness of the spring, but i might be imagining that. 

I also sliced up and got the body running on the TAZ, since my printer was too small for the huge 9 inch diameter.

After all was said and done we ended up with this beauty:

The temptation to throw it like a Frisbee is still present in my mind, but this UFBowl was unfortunately not made to fly.