If you clicked on the blog for the title, no, my fingers are not broken. However, my final objects definitely are. Absolutely everything that could have gone wrong with this project, went wrong.
It all began when I went to mold my fingers with the alginate and the rockite. I made a nice mold out of the alginate and then opened up the bucket of rockite to start mixing mold material. Little did I know, the rockite bucket was full of more alginate. Should I have noticed that something was wrong when the mixture wasn’t mixing (because the proportions of water were off)? Yes, I definitely should have. However, it was late at night and I didn’t notice this and I ended up with my first batch of finger casts that were entirely alginate.
Next, I redid the process. I remixed everything and made another set of molds. As you can probably tell from the picture, I must have done something wrong in the stirring process as it is still a but clumpy on the top. I’m not quite sure what went wrong here because I stirred it for a significant amount of time and it never really looked better than this.
Anyways, when the fingers came out of the mold, there was a slight issue. Now, I don’t know if the rockite wasn’t fully dry or something (I let it dry for about 28 hours, slightly more than the recommended 24 hour dry time), but the screw broke off of one of the fingers. Now, I decided that it would take too long to remold the fingers (again) as I had to turn the assignment in soon, so I decided to cut the screw in half, partially drill it back into the finger, and then add glue to help it stick. Well, the glue wasn’t originally part of the plan, but what kind of engineer would I be if I didn’t just decide to add glue to something randomly.
This glue (as would be expected) didn’t really help, so in the end, I made another rockite mixture and poured a bit onto the base of the finger in order to help it stick better. This sort of worked (I had to leave it at that to turn in the assignment and cut my losses). After this, I spray-painted the fingers. Nothing can go wrong with spray-paint, right? Wrong. The spray-paint can broke halfway through me spray-painting the second finger. It didn’t run out; it just broke. I luckily found another can of the same color elsewhere in the OEDK.
If you are looking at that photo and are thinking to yourself, wow that’s a really blurry and bad picture, I wish this were true. Nope, the fingers just look like they got slammed in a door about 30 seconds before creating a mold with them (they weren’t). Well, now the physical object is done. It’s on the table and I’ve cleaned up my work station outside.
At this point there is nothing left to go wrong. The final object is out of my hand and I don’t need to touch it anymore.
And it was at this point in time when the universe decided that I had not experienced Murphy’s law enough. As I was getting out my laptop to write my blog, my computer decided that it would be a good time to dislocate its own Solid State Drive, completely crashing the computer. Now this, was not just a thing I could reboot on the computer. I had to take the back plate off, remove, and reinstall the SSD (at around 4am).
Replacing parts on a computer was not something I had thought I was going to learn in this class, and to be honest, I am not thrilled that I had to learn that right about now. After all that, I finally was able to finish my project (assuming you are reading this right now and my computer didn’t self destruct again).
Cost analysis:
Bucket of rockite – zoro.com – $16.35
Bag of alginate – shopcmss.com – $19.99
Screws – $0.10 – Estimate for just 2 screws
Blue spray paint – zoro.com – $7.55
Misc. items (popsicle sticks, scale, cups for mold) – Can be found around a house pretty easily – $0
Labor – $10/hour * 10 hours (yes, it took 10 hours) = $100
Total: $143.99
