Founder, Gayle Parsons, sums up the Summer Print week by week.
Week 7
The week started off with more technical problems with the robot, which wasn’t recognising the programmes we were inputting. Megan worked valiantly to resolve it, with the help of Kevin, and the team at IAAC, but a whole day was lost which was really frustrating especially as it was such a beautiful sunny day for printing!
The next day we made up for lost time printing 21 samples from 2 mixes, our best so far! We are refining the mix by changing one variable at a time so we can really see what is the best solution for our earth mix – achieving something that is extrudable but not too soft – we need the samples to be able to meet the rigorous test requirements they’ll be undergoing at Cardiff University.
We’re now convinced that we can’t continue to keep the robot out in the open. So we’ve drafted up a re-design of the site and invited Minty from Best Little Building Co to come and take a look at building a semi-permanent shelter for her in the corner of the site. Burghley Estates Agent, Charlie will need to approve the design but he’s happy for us to erect the structure as long as it is independent of the walls of the farmyard. And we can have use of the entire long barn to expand our prep area into.
We welcomed 3 new volunteers, Ozlem from Milan University, who is here for 3 weeks, and Xanthus and Robbie from Stamford College.
Friday was a tough day. We produced no good prints and much of the prepared trugs had to be discarded because they were not printable. Sometimes I think that this is all just TOO hard….
