This project had many highs and lows for me. I’ll break it all down into ideation, development, testing and then finally making the actual product.

During the ideation phase I had quite a few issues revolving around not really having many ideas that were directly tied into steam bending. It was more like I had tome cool forms in mind and then I tried to force the idea of steam bending into them. I still found this pretty difficult for a while as I had no idea what was actually possible. This is where I also found the research in this project wasn’t particularly beneficial at all. I think it would have been far more useful to simply get into the workshop and play with steam bending and get hands on as this would give us far more insight as to what we could do.

In the development section I had found a little more stride because I had decided to focus on interacting curves. However, once again I think I focussed far too much on drawing rather than getting hands on with the process. Dylan kind of opened my eyes to this saying that the making is likely going to be far less straight forward that we initially thought simply because we don’t know what we were actually doing with the process.

In testing I quickly realised what Dylan actually meant about it being harder than I initially thought. I originally had this jig with wooden blocks, this was giving me endless problems of bounce back, non-uniform curves and then not being able to replicate the curves I wanted to use. Then once Dylan came over and instantly told me to ditch that and use a former instead the whole project went far better for me and I stared to make much faster progress! Other than wasting multiple days simply waiting for technicians to do things for me and then just before the end of the day essentially just ignore me. Alas I found a way which in the end was to go to soft modelling and get them to CNC this for me.

During the making for the final product I had multiple setbacks! These were essentially all to do with bounce back. The wood was coming out of the formers with very different forms every time. And some even initially coming out fine and then while working or simply over time would keep changing into a completely different curve. This meant multiple attempts to get two curves that were like each other to use as the bottom two curves. I think all of this was likely to be caused by the fact I didn’t give them enough time to dry due to the time being a little tight.

Overall though, I think the project went well though if I were to do it again I would want there to be more time as to make the final product to a much higher standard.

The final model went well in the sense of there being no breaks or splits or anything. However, the constant bounce back and wood deforming meant that the final model isn’t particularly accurate. This is something that is really annoying me, however, it is too late now to actually do anything about. I think the general issue of bounce back was such as issue simply because I didn’t leave it out long enough to dry, hence temperature and thing may still have affected it! Overall, I feel neutral about the whole project!

I’ve tried two types of jigs/formers for my final model. The jig approach has been somewhat unsuccessful. It gives very unpredictable results that break, curve un uniformly and are simply not re creatable. This is where the former comes into play! This method has been very useful to make curves far more reliably and accurately! The only thing now is the constant waiting that comes with steam bending and working in a full workshop which is seriously getting to me and driving me up the wall as I feel like I’m only doing about an hours work in a whole day.

An issue I am having consistently no matter the mould, is to do with bounce back which is where the wood, once released from the former would expand a little again. I think this is going to be a constant issue.

So I have kind of focused on the idea of how curves interact with each other which is interesting me somewhat and I seem to be coming up with ideas that use steam bending much more interestingly. I’ve also done pages of drawings of how curves can interact at this point.

I’ve been struggling with coming up with ideas for steam bent lights. I seem to be coming up with ideas and trying to force it into a steam bent product which is coming up with some rather weird ideas. Coming up with neat drawings is also pretty difficult, so I’ve gone back to very simple 2d drawings that simply show the idea and nothing more.

The research we’re doing involves learning the basics of steam bending, seeing existing work and then properties of lights and such. I feel like this is a little pointless for this project. I think it would be far more useful to actually get hands on and learn practically how to steam bend. Then we would make all the mistakes early on so that by the time we get to making the final product we’ll already know all the pitfalls.