Hello, Júlia here,

So this week was our final week and and we wanted to make as much progress as possible. We run a lot of tests and adjust everything to our coating be good, we tried to contact our client to see our results but she was very occupied this week so that’s unfortunate, we were really hoping that she could see our progress and see the results if they were good enough to use for film-making. Moving on, since we weren’t able to use our molded roller (as you can see in the picture below haha) we tried to cover the roller we had with therbend, to make it softer but it didn’t work, for some reason made our coating worse, so we decided to 3D printed another one because ours had a lot of glue and wasn’t doing its best job anymore.

One problem that we encountered was that our film was slipping from the reel, making the film stop moving and a lot of emulsion was being applied into the same length of film, making our coating worse. For that Dr. Hunter suggested us to change the direction of our roller because the roller and the film were moving in opposite directions so the roller was making force against the movement of the film in the reels causing the slippage. To  reverse the direction in which our roller applicator was rolling we added a set of extra gears in the front board. This reversal of direction means that the roller would be rotating counterclockwise while the loop of film roller clockwise which enhances the application of the emulsion for a more consistent coating. And it worked, the slippage was almost gone.

After that we spent most of the days using our machine and coating a lot of films to see our results and in  a few tests, our results were showing less consistent and thicker coatings. To fix that issue, of thick coating, we were able to laser cut a smaller gear that allowed us to pump out the syringe slower so would dispense less emulsion per ft of film, and since the gear was too small we changed the material of them to acrylic and it worked pretty well.  For a more consistent coating we run some tests and we found out that if we coated the 6 ft of film and the run backwards, and the roller would take the excess of emulsion out, the consistency of the coating is way better then coating 3 ft of film, waiting for it to dry and then coating the other half of the film. The picture below shows the results of using this method / technic of coating we called Our Baby *-*.

 

 

We are very excited with our results and our progress and we had so much fun at the same time, but we wish we had more time to work in our prototype so that it would work perfectly, for that we are a little sad. Below there is a picture of our final prototype and us, I’m gonna miss you guys, best team ever s2.

 

To finalize we started on our documentation for a future group and we exhibit our last presentation to the OEDK team.

Last but not least, this was my last weekend in Houston so me and Rebeca wanted to enjoy to the fullest so we went to NASA, Kemah Boardwalk, in a park with a wood roller-coaster (I almost died but I had so much fun), also we took the bus and visited Houston and some new stores (as always haha) and we went to FunPlex to have some fun. I’m really gonna miss here, the university, the OEDK, my group, well… all of it.

 

Thank you for everything, thanks for the memories Houston!

 

The end…