Arrival of the BE(a)ST

[GeePig]

Pierogi are an essential - and I would even trade my cardboard time for an hour or two making pierogi. I selected my own board and rolling pin. We don't have cats, but even they love them.

Wifie's first introduction to cooking with cats was when making pierogi. She put a tray full of them on a shelf above the stove, thinking the cats won't get them there. Ten minutes later and she is chasing a cat around the apartment with a pierogi in his mouth.

 

[GeePig]

It started to rain yesterday, so I decided to move the cardboard part of the project indoors to keep all the cardboard crisp. wifie is OK with this, she has had years getting used to me cutting and gluing the stuff, and she even keeps some of the results on her desks. I even have this great little bag from the 1960s that I use to take cardboard and tools with me when we go on vacation.

I still have to fix the front section in place, but once that done it is just a case of cutting strips of 36mm wide cardboard, cutting them to length and then gluing them in the gaps between the sections. I make them slightly over length, and then trim them to the shape I need.

 

[GeePig]

I took a short break in my real life work this morning to fix the final section in place, and here it is being set up for that.

 

[GeePig]

I spent a couple of hours last night cutting out strips of cardboard 36mm, 38mm, 40mm and 42mm wide to create more of the stiffeners between the sections on the other side from that shown in the above post - and then sticking them in. It was a drizzly night, so it was nice to be in, and was still a lot more fun than the online meeting wifie was having. Today I need to cut them down to length to achieve the right profile, then do the same for the other side.

The time I sent doing that allowed me to figure out how and whether I should wrap the cardboard I will use for the outer skin around the bottom edge.

 

[GeePig]

The 60cm/24" steel rule I bought the other week for a whole 5 zloty is excellent for marking out cardboard, as by clipping a bit of weight on either end it will follow the desired curve. Then with a pencil I can mark the cut lines.

I have made structured stuff before out of cardboard, so I am kind of familiar with the possibilities as well as with imbuing what you are doing with something beyond the level of craft and skill. My 'City Cow', for example, is a box made from the crates in which we get our cartons of milk. It stays in our city apartment, having never visited our farm.

So my tank is made from the excess cardboard from my farm, which if I had not used it to make the fuel tank would have been used to fuel our stove. And still might. This is like my counter to consumerism, where other people inform us of value. Instead I question everything in terms of its greater and lesser function. As an R&D engineer I would solve issues by examining the data, rather than by listening to other people's opinion.

For us: looking at your bike for long enough until you can finally hear what it is trying to tell you, rather than that message being drowned out by what other people are telling us about what they think it needs. No one has to approve of or even like our idea - but then they were never there to hear it.

 

[MattiThundrrr]

My 'City Cow', for example, is a box made from the crates in which we get our cartons of milk.

I like it. Makes a post modern neo-cubist statement on the commodification of animals, and by extension, the human animal and its fragmented life.
Also, it is cute with the licking.

 

[GeePig]

I like it. Makes a post modern neo-cubist statement on the commodification of animals, and by extension, the human animal and its fragmented life.
Also, it is cute with the licking.

And I could not have said it better

 

[GeePig]

More progress, and more cardboard added.

This morning, now that the glue has set, I have trimmed off the excess cardboard.

The trickiest part to cover is at the front, at the top corners, the the corners are three dimensional and tight. That means I need even more cardboard in there.

 

[GeePig]

A minor change of plan, as I realised I first had to fill in the gaps at the very bottom to allow the lowest outer skin layer to be bent under there and glued to get a relatively clean bottom line to the tank.

If I filled in the gaps around the tops I would then have to wait for the glue to set before I could turn the tank upside down and finish off down there. However, since the tank sit a little proud of the structural box, I could do the base, flip it, and then do the tops.

So here is the base done, and the tank flipped upright again.

I also need to consider where I should position the filler cap, because I will need to fit a cardboard disk to the framework before I lay the outer skin on.

At one stage I did consider buying an actual fuel tank off a Romet Komar 2330 or 2350 moped, as even with an external seam they are cute and a good size. However, I did not want to just start buying bits and bobs to make the project look better, although if I improve my metalworking equipment a bit I could convert one to be like a tool box (hence the advantage of the external seam).

Tank = decorative = make my own
Tank-based toolbox = functionality = worth some investment.

 

[MattiThundrrr]

Tank = decorative = make my own
Tank-based toolbox = functionality = worth some investment.

There's value in both. Having a functional metal tank would be super cool, but I am enjoying the cardboard process so much. Seems like you are now faced with the existential design question of form vs function. I think the cardboard is more unique, if that has any value to you. I've seen repurposed tanks, but never a paper tank

 

[GeePig]

All very true!

I try to design my process so that I can, as far as possible, avoid repeating the choices that I already know. If I already know it, then no matter how good the final result of that choice, it would kind of lack enough risk and opportunity to learn new skills.

At this moment I have no clear idea how I am going to wrap this puppy - I just feel that somehow it will look lopsided and bumpy, and I will be thinking 'Uh, right, I'll do such and such first, next time.'

Will it be worth putting a skim of filler over it, or will I be thinking that lumpy, bumpy and hairy is what it has to be?

Shall I paint it, or leave it in pizza-box white? Or shall I give it the beat-up cardboard look?

And there is always the opportunity, come March, to have a bonfire behind the big barn just as it is getting dark, and put this puppy on top

 

[GeePig]

Since the tank is closing in on being the required shape, I decided to start making the fuel cap.

The type of cardboard I cut the top and the neck parts from has two corrugated layers, which makes it a great choice when you need something with a bit of rigidity. I then faffed around for a bit looking at different bottles and cups until I had two that I thought were about the right size to mark out each disc.

As I didn't want the corrugations on the edge to show, I found a 4-egg carton in the bin and cut two 6mm wide strips, then glued and wrapped them around each disc. The disadvantage of the more structural cardboard is that the big corrugations do not offer much support for the outer skin of the cardboard, which becomes very noticeable on small shapes like these. I could cover them with a disc of plain cardboard, but instead I chose to start filling the inevitable gaps with the wood glue. The wood glue sets really hard, but it sands OK, once it has set fully.

I then tried out the fuel cap sections on the tank to figure out where it should go. I haven't stuck the pieces together yet; that will have to wait until tomorrow.

I cut another disc out using my normal milk crate cardboard, the same size as the neck of the cap. I just needed something to help guide me where the cap has to go when I get to start laying the outer skin on the tank, so that I have a flat layer on which to snugly stick that fuel cap.

So other than a few minor details, the tank is ready to skin. Of course, I am not sure how it is going to go, so I am putting it off until I have though about it enough.

 

[GeePig]

I went down the garage to do some work on my Wigry and make enough room in there for my car, but it was very cold. Still, I got a ride on my Jubilat as I had decided to store it in my piwnica (Polish for basement, but since the Polish word for beer is 'piwo', it sounds like 'beersment').

I was planning to sandwich the structural beam in a kind of wooden I-beam structure where the seat should go, so that it would be easily able to support my weight. But fitting that wood was like bodging the clean design philosophy of the beam, which was already compromised by being slotted to fit over the rack.

But I changed my mind, and I am going to trust in the cardboard instead.

Purity of design.

Whatever.

I started by cutting out a set of four sections, but I might increase this to seven. I will fill the gaps between them with some kind of grid of the structural cardboard, wrap that in a lighter layer of cardboard, then wrap that in a foam layer from an old yoga mat, and finally find some kind of material to act as the seat cover.

The advantage of all this is that the tail light fairing will then be a continuation of the seat.

Pop it on and I have a motorbike. Take it off and fit a seat, and I have a bicycle.

All this reminds me of a project back in my university days where they wanted us to design a way of quickly switching between body types for a basic truck structure. We came up with many crazy ideas, but nothing workable because we were not going to finance their futures on the backs of our ideas. If I had an electric bike, then I would be very happy if the battery and controller fitted in spaces that made my bicycle look like a cool boardracer or something. It would also be handy if I could take it from bike to bike.

 

[GeePig]

On sunday we decided to visit the farm for the day, to take a bunch of stuff that had accumulated to take there. The weather was damp and misty, but we have snow forecast over the next few weeks, so it was too good an opportunity to miss. It was great to be back, even for just a few hours, and we got two boxes of eggs while we were there from a neighbour.

While there I picked up the material I intend using for a seat cover, and cut two pieces of barn hinge to use as links on the front suspension. I also selected some more paint as I have a firmer idea now what colour the tank and rear fairing are going to be.

 

[GeePig]

I did some more work with cardboard, moving from work on the tank to outlining the shape of the seat and the rear fairing.

I was trying to visualise both how it would look and how I could construct it at the same time, so some mistakes were made while the body of cardboard was under the knife. Luckily, little of the material was wasted as it can be used elsewhere as stiffeners. At the end of a session, when I throw away the offcuts, all that is left to discard are small fragments. This is one of the things that I aim for - the minimisation of waste.

I might adjust the profile of the seat at a later stage by giving the cardboard a quick trim.

The two parts marked 'H' are for the rear fairing, and the two holes in the final section are where I will be mounting the rear lights. Since I had the two parts of the fuel cap lying around, I tried them both out for size to see which would be the best size for the lights.

I could have just used a flat section here and glued the cardboard lights to them, but that would have meant sanding off the paint for the glue. Instead the discs I cut out will form the mounting for the lights, meaning I can just run a bit of masking tape inside those holes so that they don't get paint on them, paint the fairing, pull the tape off and just plug the lights straight in the holes.

 

[GeePig]

As it is the end of November, here in Poland business is busy, and I am crunching one edit job after another. This means I need a lot of micro breaks.

The time out on the farm helped, and I realised that the method I need to skin my tank is not the optimal method of fitting large, cut-to-shape pieces, but my one. I have done a lot of mosaic work using cardboard, so the logical way forward for me is to mosaic the tank.

One way that I considered was to apply a layer of heavy paper, the kind used for those brown paper take-out type bags, and then mosaic over that using 30x30mm square tiles. The brown paper would be essential as at the moment the gaps between the structure would offer too little area to stick the tiles to. The brown paper would effectively cover the gaps and bond well over a large area, then the tiles would stick straight on to that.

Another way would be too use really large tiles, say 100x100mm, which would be large enough to stick well to the structure, but would present problems bending them around the really tight 3D corners at the top-front corners of the tank.

What I am considering is a compromise. I can brown paper bag just the sides of the tank, then apply the really big tiles to the top and lower sides, and then fill in the problem strip between with smaller tiles.

So I have cut a small set of 100x100 tiles to see how they look. As you can see - they are very flat and stiff.

The answer is to progressively crush the inner corrugation layer by running the cardboard over a hard edge in different directions until the desired shape is achieved. I did this for the racing plates on Ten Turing during the last BO. Some trimming of the edges will be required, and then once applied to the surface it has to be held down by hand for at least a count to a hundred so that it does not peel off - I often do this while watching TV.

 

[GeePig]

I now have the metal I need to join up the bits for my front fork assembly.

Rather than waste my limited good bar stock or rectangular section barn door hinge stock on a design which is really only for an experiment, I used the scrappiest of my barn door hinges. Actually I quite like the rounded edge to the wide hinges, but I have got quite a bit of that type already.

First I need to file the top face flattish because it can be a pig to drill through the corrosion layer with anything resembling accuracy, file one end flat and square, apply some masking tape to do the marking out on, drill and tidy up. For the 1" holes I am not sure whether to drill a circle of holes and then file the holes to the correct size or buy a 25mm hole saw.

The other thing I need to do is fix up my broken vice so that it kinda works.

 

[GeePig]

Let the wrapping season begin!

It just so happens that, once cut open, the bag was just about the right length for the length of the tank, and plenty wide enough to cover enough of the tank. I have begun by gluing one edge of the paper to the underside of the tank, and once it has gone off I can start figuring out where I need to make the cuts. I may as well as cover as much of the tank as I can. When that is done, I will do the same on the other side.

I intend on doing it in stages, as I am sure there will be places where the structure needs trimming or beefing up. At least when it is done the tank will be completely ready to tile.

What I wonder is how long it will be before the manufacture of home-designed parts in plastic begins to take off in our corner of the bicycle world, with people just printing off tanks and other stuff down in our own workshops and fitting them straight onto their bikes?

 

[GeePig]

While waiting for the glue to go off, here is my ancient teddy bear.

I made the teddy chair for wifie when she began having to give lessons online from home. I bought her a nice adjustable height desk, chair and made this for those times when her students do group work and she needs to leave her desk - with teddy left to keep an eye her students.

What I really want to show is the kind of cardboard effect I am trying to achieve. Sure, I could make appropriate drawings, calculate all the bending allowances, and produce an immaculate product, like it was made by a machine.

But that is not my aim.

I want waste material to look like waste material that one might actually like, to take away some of that negative connotation that waste has.

Like a good rat rod, that finish was not accidental either because, just like we might let something get extra rusty, I beat up the cardboard after I finished.

My plan is for my tank, seat and rear fairing to look used, even repaired, even though I am going to paint so that it does not immediately look like used cardboard.

 

[MattiThundrrr]

Brother Bear has some mileage!