The working properties of materials was extremely important in my bee project as I had to select a plastic which had a high water barrier, light weight, semi-rigid, and tough. In order to do this i invested the working properties of various plastics to find the one that was best suited. This was vital to the success of my project and really helped me to understand the important of working properties. I found it helpful to also test my materials myself to see how they cope in certain conditions. For my projects as i said it was important materials had a high water barrier. I placed scarps of potential materials in a glass of water for an hour, buried them outside in the garden and stress tested them to see which material worked the best.
During the design and make module i wanted to make the legs from wood as i have little experience with wood work. I chose to use Pine, primarily as it was cheap and easy to acquire but also because it is naturally light weight and can be painted or stained easily. As my product is low to the ground and needed to be movable, wight was important issue when picking materials, meaning i needed to use my knowledge of working properties of wood.
When working with the material i encountered a few problems with using cheap pine which i did not foresee. I discovered later on that the long strip of pine i purchased were severely bent, something i did not notice in B &Q as well as something i had not even considered looking for! I did however look for planks with the least amount of knots as i know that this weakens the wood and causes splitting, this was rather difficult as most/if not all the planks had many knots in them. Although picking a cheap wood seemed like a good idea at the time, I should be more selective with materials in the future, as you get what you pay for in most cases. I combated the problem however by planing the wood down to try and take out the bends and then selecting the straightest parts of the planks with least amount of knots. This created a lot of waste materials and money although i tried to use the bed wood as practice pieces. As pine is also a very soft wood the legs were easily damaged and marked during the manufacturing process and also when marking out which spoilt the final finished product. Fortunately i was painting the legs which covered most of the marks. If i work with this material in the future i will make more practice pieces to avoid mistakes on the final parts, and take greater care to avoid damage. When selecting wood in the future i will consider the working properties closer before committing myself to a material and not be swayed by cost and ease of acquiring it. If I do chose to use pine in the future I have more knowledge of the pitfall and advantages and will work with it more appropriately. I should have used my knowledge acquired from the wood presentation better as i could have avoided a lot of the mistakes by referring back to that piece of work. When choosing a materials for a project/product it is important to know the 'Working properties' in order to select a suitable material to ensure the product works correctly without problems. For example considering how much weight (compression) will the product have to bare, will it bend?, the toughness etc.
Other working which i am aware of are properties include - Hardness, Bending strength, ductility, Malleability, and corrosion......... .... I will need to look at the working properties of materials when creating my own products to ensure I choose the appropriate materials as I mentioned in R1. I selected Cheap pine which was not appropriate for the needs of my product as it was too soft and therefore dented and marked easily. I too a screen shot of materials working properties from the GCSE Bitesize website as I thought it would be useful to have words and definition to refer to when i am considering a material for my projects. |