I only played a small role in this project, but I’m proud to have been a part of it. I’ve worked with Fu-Tung Cheng, founder of CHENG Design and CHENG Products (ShapeCrete) for the past 4 years or so. I’ve learned a tremendous amount about concrete forming, casting, and finishing from a design and fabrication […]
First the master is secured to a baseboard with silicone, surrounded by foam walls, sprayed with mold release, and then it’s ready to cast a polyurethane rubber mold (polytek 75-60). Pouring the rubber: The rubber is ready to remove after about 12 hours. Some air bubbles were formed from air escaping from wood because the […]
“Husk at elske mens du tør det Husk at leve mens du gør det” “Remember to love while you dare to Remember to live while you do” – Piet Hein (1905 – 1996) After finishing the outdoor tabletop and using it for a few weeks, I started thinking about what kind of top to make […]
Levelers screw into the legs of a table base, which can be adjusted so the table doesn’t wobble. I have two of the herman miller contract bases, but one was without levelers. I thought the levelers from the one would swap over to the other, but the thread size and pitch is different between the […]
This tabletop is made for an Eames contract table base and will be outdoors on the patio. The tabletop that came with this base is 36″ in diameter and is made out of MDF or something with a laminate surface that is an ugly marbled white / yellow (and weighs 24 lbs.). This top isn’t […]
After waiting 2 weeks for reproduction shock mounts to arrive, it became clear that the company didn’t have any in stock, and there would be more waiting, so I made my own. The best resource is the eames patent from 1953, “FURNITURE SHOCK MOUNT CONSTRUCTION” (2,649,136). The patent goes into detail about shock mounts for […]
Got lucky and saw my neighbor putting two chairs out to the street. One was this grey chair. In really good shape, with some wear around the edges and the white paint splatter that comes from being kept in the garage. Having never really taken a close look at one of these fiberglass chairs, I […]
Here is a concrete clock made from tupperware, a funnel, and a piece of foam. The form is pretty easy to make and uses a standard clock mechanism that you’ll find in most any craft store in the usa. This project was completed at work and the point was to find cheap forming materials that […]
This table takes advantage of a unique property of glass fiber-reinforced concrete (GFRC). The material can be bent roughly 20 minutes after casting, when it has entered a false-set. I made this mould, and the one for the blue table, to demonstrate this technique for the 3-day advanced fiber-reinforced concrete training at work. This had […]
One day at work I had some leftover epoxy tooling compound after casting a master for the stepping stones. Not wanting to waste it, I poured it into the plastic moulds that were used to cast the concrete salt cellars. Those moulds were made to create half-spheres, but I was using them backwards to make […]
This is an easy way to construct moulds for blowing glasses or vases or stuff like that. It gets more complicated if the shape has undercuts because it won’t pull straight out, so the mould has to split apart. It’s best to use solid wood if you can. Next best is plywood. The worst is […]
Seeing pictures of ancient dice inspired me to make them out of concrete. Throughout history dice were probably carved from stone, maybe wood, but for sure bone. Here is a nice link showing how to make these old dice out of antler. Last week I had a reason to make a small rubber test mould […]
Demold Rubber: After about 12+ hours, the rubber mould has cured. First remove the form walls and then gently pry up on the rubber with a plastic putty knife. The rubber should pull off easily with almost no damage to the original plasticine piece. The rubber picks up EVERY detail from the original piece, which […]
Here’s what I’ve been doing at work recently. In the past we created a series of stepping stone moulds for casting concrete, one of which can be seen here. Last time I made a computer file and the shape was cut out on a CNC router, which is great, but the shapes were very controlled, […]
I made these concrete egg holders for the 21pop shop at the FOG art and design fair 2014 in san francisco. In order to produce a lot of the same thing in a short amount of time, I made a few rubber molds and used a concrete mix that sets up very quickly (rapidset). This […]