Good info, although I'd still like to find someone who has done similar
work with one of those inflatable exercise balls.. that would be an awesome
VDG terminal :)
On Fri, Oct 19, 2018, 10:38 AM jimlux <jimlux@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> On 10/18/18 10:14 PM, Matthew Sweeney wrote:
> > I would much prefer to find a nice wood or plastic form to use, but
> haven't
> > had much luck finding a source of cheap rings, spheres of various sizes.
> > The polystyrene forms I found are fairly dense and I actually want to
> make
> > these items quite light if possible.
> >
> > Time will tell if it works :)
> >
>
> There have been all sorts of interesting ideas proposed in the past..
> It's hard to find them in the archives, because there's no obvious
> search term..
>
> Here's some ideas:
>
> Spheres are easier
> - cheap globes can be painted or metalized
> - garden gazing balls - they can be hard to drill/cut
> - floats & buoys
> - large glass or plastic carboys
> - spherical pressure tanks of various kinds
>
> Toroids are harder
> - tire inner tubes
>
> There's plenty of discussion about various ways to do papier mache or
> plaster of paris or fiberglass over some form, and then you're faced
> with the problem of a conductive coating.
>
> As Antonio pointed out, for a lot of applications the coating does not
> have to be particularly thick, just smooth & conductive, so spray on
> aluminum paint might work fairly well. I used to have a can of flat
> black spray paint that clearly used carbon black as the pigment, so it
> was quite conductive.
>
> You can go to a paint store and ask them about mixing a custom batch
> with aluminum powder, and then you'd use a standard air spray gun (e.g.
> Binks gun) to apply it. Ask about "gilding"
>
> you can also do traditional gilding with thin metal sheets - gold is, of
> course, traditional, and makes a very nice smooth mirror surface, if
> applied upon an appropriate substrate that is strong enough to burnish
> the gold.
> (a quick amazon check shows 0.12 square meters (1120 cm2) of gold leaf
> is about $15, so covering a 50 cm sphere would be about $150.)
>
> There's also thin aluminum and silver sheets.
>
> You can also call around to shops that do evaporated metal deposition -
> you can get almost anything covered in a metal film of your choosing -
> how do you think they make those cool mirrored sunglasses, after all. If
> you're not picky about even-ness of coating, it's a lot cheaper - the
> sunglasses folks want just the right thickness and it has to be even.
>
> There are also specialty plating shops that can plate almost anything -
> I've seen all manner of things (including things made of wood) plated -
> think about bronzing baby shoes as an example.
>
> Although, overall, conductive spray paint is probably easiest.
>
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