Three Birthday Presents
With the upcoming birthday of the girlfriend, something anew was needed. Using leftover Corian from the fluDOC project and some beautiful blocks of Cedar wood, a set of earrings and pendant where designed, and built.
The Corian was shaped into small, 1mm thick circular plates. The Cedar was shaped into the teardrop shape, with shallow surface holes for the Corian. Lots of shaping, sanding, and polishing spawned the final results.
The Earrings
The Pendant
The Process
Details regarding the creation process can be found below.
The First Sketches
It can be quite hard to come up with merely a shape for an earring or pendant. After some visual thinking and playing around with shapes, the choice was made to follow a teardrop-inspired form. This was visualized with some basic ballpoint sketches during the weekly train-rides.
Exploring the teardrop shape to some more precision resulted into the inclusion of the Corian discs. Playing around with sizes and placement finally developed the rough outline of the shape.
The Final Design
After the sketches were completed, it was time for a more thorough contours of the work at hand. Using Adobe Illustrator, a precise rendering was made showcasing all the views.
Materials
The Cedar offers a esthetic grain and brown-reddish color. It is not too dense for tooling, and polishes nicely.
The Corian is known for it’s high density and strong white appearance. It is easily polished and tooled into shape and finish.
Construction
The first part was constructing the rough teardrop shape out of a block of Cedar using a bandsaw. This allows for margin when the holes for the Corian might not be in perfect alignment.
The next step involved cutting the holes for the Corian plates. After which is was time to construct the Corian discs. Without a lathe available, a different approach was done using a table drill. By fixating a small Corian peg to the drill bit of the table drill, it can be operated as a lathe. The peg is rotated by the drill, and rubbed by a file and sandpaper until it fits snug into one of the holes in the Cedar. Afterwards, small plates where cut of the ends of these pegs and glued into place.
Sanding
After having glued all the final pieces of Corian in their respective positions it was time to begin final shaping. By covering the discs with some masking tape in a specific form, the outline of the area in need of shaping is revealed. Using this approach, the sides are easily sanded down to their final profile.
Polishing
Using fine grit sandpaper and some polish material, both earrings and the pendant where buffed to a nice finish. A time-consuming, yet necessary process.
Assembly
Final assembly involved drilling the holes for the rings and earwires or lace. By using an anthracite color, the assembly can remain in the shadow, providing full focus on the earrings themselves.
Size and Placement
Using one of the last warm and sunny days of the year, the recipient was used to illustrate the size and placement.
Stats
completed in: December, 2010
time spent on project: in the order of 20 hours distributed over many weeks
stakeholders: Simone van Zuilichem