Materials/Fiber
Proposal
- Develop the fiber deposition head
- Develop the machine to move it around a core, and build up thin shells and solid shells of material.
Working Notes
On November 19, 2009 10:23:54 am Forrest Higgs wrote: > http://www.popsci.com/bown/2009/product/x-flex-blast-protection-system
I'm interesting in fiber-reinforced materials for things like a Below-The-Knee Prosthetic leg.
I'll try to dig up that email by the fellow who wanted to donate his patents, and see
1) What he was talking about 2) If he'd be interesting in writing it up on the wiki 3) Including pictures? 4) Blog, create thread in forum 5) Would he want to help design mechanisms?
Next action: find the email without kmail crashing again.
Right now, I'm daydreaming about spinnerets laying up lines or sheets around a water soluble core. That core can be a cylinder, and the cylinder can be the main support element in the leg (aka) shinbone, or that core can be a water-soluble calf and hollow aluminum shinbone, and then we build up a load-bearing shell out fiber-reinforced epoxy.
A prosthesis tech would probably chuckle at this blathering, and just do up lay up sheets of fiberglass or cf-fiberglass in a mold. But if we can CNC or print molds from laser-scanned stump data, with the machinery < $1000USD, I think we've changed the game a bit. And building up fiberglass is still cool for other things, like little robot limbs.
The SpoolHead was designed to place copper wire. Is any changes needed for it to place fiber?
