Material Testing/ Prototyping

Bend Calculations including lengths, angles and order.

Material Testing on 10mm Dia. steel round bar.

Initial Bending.

Almost finished.

 Final Form. When the two bend pieces were held 

together with masking tape and the welding joints the 

structure was very strong. When i sat on it with a piece 

of ply wood for support. It easily held my weight with

 a medium amount of flex.

 Once it was all welded up the form was incredibly 

strong, with little flex with dynamic weight and no flex

when static. 

 For the seating options i would like to weaved rope. 

The main factors for choosing which rope to use is

• Material life-time/ wear and tear
• Aesthetics
• Sustainability and environmental impact

These are a few options:

Product Drawings

1:1 Side Elevation

Exploded View

Perspective Rendering - Final Design

Conceptual Design

Material Research Part 2 + Idea/ Form Refinement

A selection of different types of ropes that would beuseful for a 

comfortable weaved seat.

                               1. (TopLeft) A harder twisted straw rope.

                               2. (TopRight) An elastic rope surrounded in woven nylon.

                               3. (BottomRight) similar to 1 but softer straw.

                               4. (BottomLeft) A softer cotton woven rope less durable 

                                   than straw, with a smaller diameter but stronger the elastic rope.

Another possible solution could be a wicker seat, a material 

both durable and light in weight and is also very good for 

outdoor scenarios.

A weight calculator for steel round bar from stirlingsaustralia.com.au. 

It shows that the weight for 5 meters of 8mm dia. steel round bar 

fall just below the 2kg limit. 6mm dia. is evidently much lighter at

1.12kg for 5 meters, although may prove to be too week to hold

the weight of a person. 

A steel supplier local to my residential area that has a wide range of

steel rod, including diameter sizes 6.3mm and 8mm

Exploring and revising how my main stool concept will be constructed; 

because of the complicated overlapping design of the bar structure

i found splitting the form into 2 individually bent pieces which can then

be slotted and welded together.

This is the resulting design made from coat hanger wire with thin 

lock-wireholding the joints together.

With the added strength of cotton lace woven seat, the 8cm tall ,

1:5 scale, model easily took the weight of my computer.

A cardboard mockup of the potential surface area of triangular 

stool concept 9shown in relation to the seat of an average 

chair); A equilateral triangle with 450mm sides, given that 

the stool would about 400mm tall. This seems slightly too large, 

and therefore i will reduce the size by 12.5% making it a 

400mm side triangle; a more manageable and ergonomic size. 

models

 First wire model with woven seat part..

 First model taking the load of a 600mL bottle of water

Second, larger scale model made from coat hanger wire

Coat hanger wire model taking the load of a kettle

 filled with 3 Liters of water.

Major Idea

A few ideation sketches..

Main Idea for stool; possible material would be 

tubular metal, metal rod, or even tubular plastic.The 

structure is simple and reveals a problem with the 

overlapping joints sliding around, but even though it is 

only a rough model (approx 60mm tall) it can take the 

full load of an IPhone. There would need to be some 

sort of cover for the top of the stool, to make more 

comfortable..

 Weaved rope is a possible way of creating the seated

surface. Although other options such as leather, 

acrylic, or even glass could be used, the rope would not

only allow for comfortable seating, but also give a 

unique aesthetic and help add to the strength of the stool

by hold the overlapping 'joints' tighter together.

tracing paper update

These are some of the other experiments of form that i did with tracing paper last week.. after the trouble i had finding enough strength in this as a material, i decided to postpone trying to use it.

Research part 5

I have been entertaining the idea of using tracing paper as one of the materials for my stool design for its unique, semi-transparent, light weight and possibly innovative qualities. Although the problems faced with using paper in this project is that it is very flimsy and weak, so i would need to find a way to stengthen it.. 

For my first attempt i tried to glue multiple sheets together with PVA to create a thick board. I cut 20 X 300mm by 300mm squares of tracing paper.

 After gluing the first four sheets it became obvious that this approach would be quite a lot more difficult and time consuming than i originally thought.

 I used heavy books to try to flatten out the paper, but this didnt work at all, the paper was very damp and wrinked from the glue

 After 4-5 hours the glue had barely started to dry out and with the paper deformed, it was not really what i wanted and i looked for diiferent ways that i could possibly used this material for stength..

..to be updated.