IDEA 1 & FAILURE
This week as i was traveling a wasn’t able to post the blog on time. However, as I was unable to do actual experimentation, I only worked on my ideas. I developed some new ideas that I most certainly will incorporate into my final prototype.
- After some googling i realized that there is not much options for me to create a parachute from paper. I had no idea how to do it so that i won’t use all 10 allowed A4 papers, so i decided to leave this idea for later, if the others won’t work out.
- I decided that i will put egg in a box. I learned how to do a perfect box from 2 paper sheets a while ago, so I decided to implement this skill here. I decided to do so mainly because it would be much easier and effective for me to attach (using tape) the other parts of the construction (the ones meant to absorb the energy from the fall) to a paper box than an egg (due to symmetrical and larger shape. that is how two paper boxes look together (there is where i put my egg in. it is not exactly stable there but i thought it is not a big deal as it was my first experiment anyway).
p.s. my personal record of folding a box reached 3 minutes. (the first box I folded in 7 minutes…..)
- When surfing the Web, i encountered with way of folding paper (like accordion basically) and it seemed quite “jumpy”. I thought i could use it to create a “jumpy” construction by attaching it to sides of the egg’s shell So i decided to check it out. In the video below i am demonstrating what this material is capable of, which, spoiler, was not exactly what i was looking for.
as it turns out, this accordion style only works it falls exactly on the right spot for it to fold. plus, i didn’t really know how to attach it to the box (or anything else) using tape to reserve the jumpiness, so i decided to move on from that for now.
- I also was thinking about crumbled paper as a material to observe some energy. and as i already had the needed materials and knew how to attach it to the box. So I went for it and created a sketch of the prototype.
the idea is to shell the box with the egg with multiple “balls” of crumbled paper (numbers 1-4 are created from the A4s, while numbers 5-12 (8 pieces) created from cut in half A4s) + the box, for this prototype I used up the total 2 (box) + 4 + 4(8 halves) = 10 a4 papers. which is the maximum. I know. But it is my first prototype that I decided to actually assemble so I believe it is fine.
the final piece looked like this:
yes, kind of messy. To be honest, the messiness came when I realized that attaching those crumbled pieces to the edges of the box (which I thought will be easy) turned out to be impossible using just one piece of tape. so, here we go. plus, i added some tape to stick the box’s parts together as well. halfway through I started revolving the construction around to check what places of the box still can potentially touch the paper. You can see it on the video as well. Also, in the video below I am showing how I was trying to increase the effectiveness of the attachment of the crumbled paper by creating this space for the edge to kind of fold into. didn’t really help but should count as a valuable attempt.
I couldn’t wait to try the construction out already. So I did it. And it failed me.
I was kind disappointed but wasn’t really surprised. The construction involved too much tape for it to be viable and cool. I have some other ideas left, but about that in another post.