Sand Frame: Final Project Report Part 2

I am really happy  with how my project turned out. Finally the long hours of prototyping payed off. I think people at the expo liked my project. I am glad I build a wooden frame to go around the glass it really made a difference.

What it means?
I thought of what this means  for a while but wasn’t able to come up with a nice statement about it. However, just by asking people what they think they said that by looking at the sand falling down gave them a sense of relaxation or calmed them somehow. I feel the same way about these sand frames, but still find it a little difficult to come with a meaning. I guess there is something calming about watching elements from nature in motion. What do you think?

Design Elements:
The sand frame has three different natural elements: sand, water, wood and air. I like that the mixed sand color grade matches the wood in the frame.

Feedback from Expo:
I got some feedback from Saturday expo and the Monday presentation.  I got questions like how can you make it faster or how do you add more liquid in it? This made me think to add a tutorial section of how to use the sand picture frame and what to add and not add to it. Anyways in this section I will go over the main points that I need to improve on moving forward with this project.

What worked and what didn’t:
In this section I would like to discuss my initial design plans and say why some didn’t work:

• Use Acrylic for carving out shapes –> acrylic frames bent and leaked
• Change gap  between the glass for sand go faster –> air bubbles don’t hold sand anymore
• Build a 3D sand frame –> does  not function as a sand frame anymore (the sand is not held by air bubbles anymore).
• Add a pressure driver –> was difficult to implement in a sealed water environment. Also I needed a very thin  pressure driver tip to fit in the gap of the frame.

Now that I know more about my build I have some ideas for improvement that are worth mentioning.

Moving forward:
At some point I will build another frame this summer. In the next build I would like to change a few steps or actually change the order of my manufacturing.

• Have the glass frames spaced out evenly by a longer space. (I used a short spacer on my build, compared with the glass I am using). Future builds should have longer spacers to go across the frames.
• Have the routing in the wood line accurately with the glass
• Squirt the silicon on the edges of the frame and have it as uniform as possible in order to maintain the same thickness and avoid wavy shapes.
• Add more sand and potentially have more sand colors. Preferably a dark color and another bright color. Also when I get the sand next time I would like to maintain a different grain size on the different colors. Having a different size grain helps the sand form consistent layers of similar grain size because similar grain sizes tend to fall and remain together
• Widen the gap in the stand
• Try to implement a pressure driver

Where will this go?
This piece is going to be a gift to my dad when he flies in to see me graduate. He saw this in a gift shop before and wanted to buy. So I thought it was a good ideas to give the frame to him