Building my Model

The first thing I did was removing the support from the bottom of the model. Because the 3D Printer has to print from the bottom up layer by layer, and the shape of my model is circular, there. are supports attached to the bottom half of the tube? I used a small plier to remove the support on the bottom part. One thing that's hard for me is that this model didn't print well, and it cracked towards the bottom where the support meets the core.

One problem I had with the removing the support and making it a proper core to use is that when I first try to attach the cracked bottom to the top, I didn't know what to do. I used water and put the two parts together. I used too much water and I tried to use paper towels to dry it. Because the core is still sticky when I used the paper towels to dry it, some of the fabrics from the paper towel stayed on the model and made it dirty. Even though I tried my best to clean it an fix the shape of it, it is still kind of dirty when I finish. I ended up printing another one and hoping that it would work.

I used the 3D printer in our lab to print the new model. I printed two together just in case one of them didn't turn out working. Both of them printed just fine, but part of the bottom of one of them broke when we try to take it off from the platform of the printer. I successfully removed the support from the one that was printed well and the core is now ready for the next step.

The next step I did was I made the acrylic box with acrylic boards. This process is harder than I thought. I failed on the first three attempts. The first time I tried, I glue the core to the two sides and then tried to glue the two sides to the bottom part. The glue connecting the core and the two sides wasn't completely dry yet so the core falls apart from the two sides. Failing for two times, I decided to do it differently. I glued one of the sides on to the bottom first and glue the core to that one side. Then I glued the other three sides on to the bottom. This method worked.

It took me a long time to fix the leak. The hot glue always leaves some hole in between and the water would just come out from those tiny holes. I had to keep putting layers of glue on it to fix the leak. The first time I did it, I put a lot of layers on and the box was still leaking. I had to peel off all of the hot glue and redo everything. The second time I was more careful about it, and. I worked after putting a couple of layers on.

The next thing I did was I prepared the silicone that's needed to fill the model. There are a lot of bubbles in the silicone, so I left it in the vacuum chamber for about 30 minutes. It is necessary to leave it in there for this long because the liquid silicone is very viscous and the bubbles move up slowly.

After getting the bubbles out, I poured the silicone into the acrylic box and leave it to dry over the weekend.