Concrete Object Project (#3 - TRIAL 2)

After my previous drawbacks and the terrible concrete object, I decided to do it again. This time, instead of trying to get the edges as straight as I could with plaster-board and balsa wood, I decided to 3D print an inverted mold to use. Lem and Mr. Williams taught me how to turn my sketchup model into a software file that could be sent to the 3D printer. I needed to turn my sketchup file into an stl file, and then use Cura (software) to turn it into a gcode file (which can be sent to the 3D printer).

After doing all this, the printer printed out my mold and looked like this:





The edges of this mold are much cleaner than what I made previously. I also inverted my design to create this mold, which is why the center triangle has been extended much higher than the rest. I then used plaster-board to create the same triangular prism I created before, and placed this 3D printed mold inside, facing upwards. This is a picture of my mold after I poured the concrete in and let it dry, but it shows what my mold looked like:



This created something similar to what I had last time, but it was cleaner and more precise.

After letting the concrete dry, I peeled off the outer layers to give me this:



One problem I encountered was that my concrete structure was stuck to the 3D printed mold, and it wouldn't come off. Lem then told me the only way to remove my object was to cut through the 3D mold and rip/tear it off. He used a chisel and a hammer to crack the 3D mold, but he didn't realize it also cracked my concrete structure.

This was very disappointing, because I loved the colour of concrete, but the strength was compromised due to this crack. I ended up glueing the two pieces together and using plaster putty to cover up the crack. The problem with this was that the plaster putty was white, therefore was easily seen:









Since this putty was too visible, it made my overall object look unfinished and unprofessional. However, this wasn't the only thing making my project look bad. Since I had to glue my project back together, the glue started dripping out of the crack, and stained the inside triangle:



For these reasons, I ended up painting the whole thing black to cover the putty, the glue the the cracks. I wasn't super happy with how my project turned out, because it wasn't the colour of concrete anymore, and it had a huge crack, but I think trial 2 was much better than trial 1.

Overall, I learned a lot about how to fix some problems with concrete. In addition, if you really don't like how a project turned out, do it again! This is only if resources isn't a limited, which for this project, it wasn't a constraint.

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