Hi everyone! It's been a while since my last post, almost 4 months. Rest assured, I haven't given up. I'm still working on the project. It's just really hard right now to work out times to come in and work on the rollercoaster with my teacher. Even though I'm going to school in person now, he's still really busy. In any case, I was recently able to go in and work finally! Right now, I'm working on figuring out a process I can use to bend PVC. My solution was to "bake" sand in an aluminum pan until it was hot enough, then pour the hot sand into the PVC pipe as it lays over my form. However, things didn't exactly go as planned. The aluminum pan was too flexible, and as my teacher and i tried to pour sand into the pipe, it spilled everywhere. Because of this, the sand ended up cooling off way too much and so I didn't really get the bend I was looking for. I'm trying to figure out a solution to that right now; a sand delivery device that will make it easier to heat up and then pour the sand into the pipe.
So you may have noticed I haven't posted any updates since October. That's not because I'm inactive, but it's just that the circumstances have been such that I haven't been able to go in and work on my project. First, it's been getting darker earlier, which makes it hard to go in and work during the day. I get out of school at 3:35pm, and the sun goes down around 5:00pm. This means that by the time I get to FabLab after school to work on my project, I only have about half an hour of sunlight left to work in. Also, I'm currently working on figuring out how to bend pipes, and I don't have all of the tools I need yet. The plan for bending them is to pour hot sand into the PVC piping to make it more pliable, then strap it to a jig to bend it. For that I need something to heat the sand in large quantities, and all I have right now is a small camping stove; so not quite enough. College applications has also taken up a large chunk of my time the last couple of ...
I found some cake pans at a thrift store.
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