CART 411 - Studio Project

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Making the bath bombs moulds! We had many fails throughout this entire process! We couldn’t get the moulds to work properly to create one fully animal so we opted for half animals instead!

We create the mix and after leaving out for a bit and making more moulds we realized that it wasn’t hardening and holding together as much as it was at the beginning. Leaving the mix out like that wasn’t the best idea for some reason as it lost some of its consistency!

We also put red food dye in the moulds so that when we tested them out by putting them in water, it fizzed red... almost like blood, which is what we were going for! 

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Looking good! Here is the final look for our arcade!

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We added the sticker which shows the title of our project/game on the front of the arcade. With the remaining scraps of the yellow sticker, we added lines on each side to fill in the void.

We went back to the painting room to add another yellow square on the bottom part of our arcade too. We felt it looked a bit empty and decided to fill it in with an idea we had at the start but completely forgot about.

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Turns out the second chain we ordered to link to our already existing chain in order to make it longer or the right size, was to arrive on December the 2nd which is the day of our presentation of this project! 

We then opted to entirely remove the chain and gears and simply attach the handle to the rod on which the strings and figurines will be attached. We filled in the pre-existing holes we had made previously with the gears and painted over them as if they never existed.

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This week, we created the side handle which the participants will use to lower their figurines into the aquarium below. It went fine until we encountered a big problem; the chain we had ordered online was either too small or too long!

They sent us little spare parts we could use to make the chain longer but it seems they didn’t send the right parts as most of them didn’t fit into the already existing chain we had? It was quite strange...

We’ve ordered the same chain online and hope that we will be able to implement the two of them together so that we may create the length we need to finish our arcade box!

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The inside of the box was painted a dark black and we used green tape to create an outline on each side panel of the box so that we could paint a bright yellow contour!

If you look at the second picture with the back panel on the wall, you can clearly see the one part that meets with the aquarium that we had to thin out so that it would finally fit!

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Painting process started! After sanding the entire box and rendering entirely smooth, we went and bought the paint for a much-needed paint job!  

We went with a punchy blue colour for the outside to really make it seems like an arcade machine.

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We put the aquarium inside the box and it didn’t fit! It was a tad too big in width which we didn’t expect because we had the correct measurements! 

We weren’t quite sure what to do, either we re-did an entire back panel with thinner material or we tried and thine out our already existed back panel so that it would fit in place. We opted with thinning out the back panel we already had, not sure how long it took but roughly a good 45 minutes to do 172 cuts on the area where the panel met with the aquarium to thin it out!

It was a messy operation but ended up fitting perfectly when we tried fitting on the back! The back panel was not a lot more fragile as it was thinned out but it saved us quite some time.

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Assembly! We glued each of the panels together, finishing them with an air stapler so that it all stays together. As mentioned previously, certain parts of the process was not documented as we often forgot to take our phones out. However, the two parts you see there with the green take were both made and cut at a 45-degree angle so that they may fit perfectly within one another.

So far everything fitted perfectly!

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Some pictures are missing as when we’re working in the woodshop we don’t keep our phones on us, therefore, we forgot to take some pictures of certain parts of the process! However, we followed by making the two side panels of the box, cutting a hole at the top so we would be able to insert the wooden rod when the figures and strings will be placed.

We followed by glued some support on each side of the panels for the aquarium as well as the figure shelf! The aquarium is quite heavy and when filled with water it’ll be even heavier, therefore, we went for support that was strong and effective.

We also added some support parts at the bottom of each side panel so that the back panel of the box could easily be screwed in whenever we wanted, instead of having to glue it and be stuck with it like this.

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Here is the beginning process! We bought the aquarium near Concordia University, took the measurements and planned out the box! For the box, we went for a material that was smooth, strong, resistant and quite easy to work with, thus we chose some MDF.

We started out by cutting the right size for the front and the back panels before cutting out the aquarium window and the figure shelf window right below. We rounded out the corners of the windows to give them a more snazzy look!

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Here were our original design ideas for the Arcade box we were set to create. Some measurements were changed to fit our need as the building process occurred.

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Three References -

Castle Made of Sand by Michel de Broin, 2015.

The California Camp Fire, 2018.

Waste to Wonder by Ocean Sole Africa, 2019.

Here is the link to our presentation! Click here!