Progress

Over the past week we have been trying our best to collect all the bamboo we need. We spent two days (Wednesday and Friday) cutting down bamboo and we now have everything. We have also started to cut our bamboo to size and have started painting it. This will take quite a while but once all the pieces are cut and painted black we will assemble the structure. This may only take a day per module. There are 4 large modules and one smaller module. This may take half a day. We are in the process of ordering our glowsticks. We have three weeks until the exhibition.We have many late nights ahead of us.

Cutting Bamboo

We were very lucky as it was a beautiful sunny day when we went to cut down our bamboo from Sonya's garden.  We were lucky in that we were able to take as much as we wanted. So far we have spent two days cutting down bamboo and will possible need one more day to cut more down. We had to trim and cut the bamboo into shorter pieces and we also started to sand the bamboo.

Last week we began experimenting further with how we could connect the bamboo. We think a connection like this would make the structure much stronger and would decrease the amount of space the bamboo would take up (as when you bind the bamboo you double the space the bamboo takes up as the bamboo overlaps). We think this would be good for the outer structure as this will be the supporting structure and will need to be strong.

We also started to bind around the connection. This will give the strcuture a more beautiful sense of detail. It will also give the bamboo more strength around the diameter and stop it from splitting. Though in our final structure the bamboo will be black!

Binding the bamboo for the Prototype.

Below are some photographs of binding techniques that we have tried out.

Philipino Lashing

Japanese Square Lashing

Combination of Japanese and Philipino Lashing

Sanding the Bamboo.

This week we managed to acquire free Bamboo from a lovely lady called Sonia. Over the last few days we have been busily sanding down the entire lot of bamboo so that we can spray them black.

Problems we have encountered.

Last week we managed to aquire some bamboo to use for our prototype. we painted it with black acryllic paint over the weekend, but we found that the paint just chipped off the surface of the bamboo when it dried!
We had to sand all of the paint off and further sand down the bamboo to remove the smoothe surface of the bamboo. Luckily the second time we applied the paint onto the bamboo it did not chip off!

Without the surface sanded down.

After sanding!

We also experimented binding the bamboo pieces together which worked really well. We have had a few problems however where the horizontal bamboo pieces are slipping so we are going to have to put our heads together and figure out a way of preventing the slipping.

Thinking About Binding

We are looking at different types of lashing. The trippod lashing may work for the corners of the glowstick boxes and the bamboo boxes.

Tripod Lashing

Diagonal Lashing

Japanese Box Lashing

Materials and Development

Today we found a suitable mesh material that could possibly be used for our final structure. We have also found bamboo and a suitable twine to bind our bamboo with. We have a large quantity of glowsticks that we can use for our prototype! We have been developing our structure and have designed it to be more modular making it easier for us to construct on the day. We are planning to have about five modules of our bamboo structure that can slot together easily and quickly.

We have also reconsidered the idea of using a pully system. The ropes may slip off the pullys and if the pullys are 8m high then it will be impossible for us to fix it if this were to happen on the night. We have decided to use rings instead. We will thread the rope through the ring and the rope will have no chance of slipping out. We are currently looking into binding.

Developing Our Measurements

Today we spent some time figuring out our final measurments. We made a few changes to the plan of our structure in order to make it easier for people to enter.