User:Hugo

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Hallo my name is Hugo van der Loo second year product designer at Willem de Kooning academy. I have choosen the practise digital craft because I'm interrested in the connection between theorie and praktise. The history of craft industry and making is a central theme in this quater. I want to make a product that translate my point of view toward this topic.



Three pictures of the knitting technique

Hand breien.jpg Breimachine.jpg Self-knitting lamp shade by nadine sterk.jpg

Above three pictures of the knitting tehnique. The first one is knitting by hand, the second knitting with a 19th century machine, the thidt one is a knitting machine as part of a lamp.

My own rope machine

IMG 20160308 150140726 HDR.jpg Touwmachine.jpg IMG 20160308 151926343 HDR.jpg Touw van 43 draden.jpg I was inspired by a book about knots. I looked at a piece of rope a thought to myself how something like that is made? It’s such a simple product, but it consists of a lot tiny yarns. On internet I learned about rope making and found out that the basics of the machine aren’t that complicated. I went in the metal workstation to make my own small rope machine. After I made my own rope with a lot of different materials. I realized that I liked the process of making more interesting than the actual product itself. The threading of the yarns. The rotation of that forms a rope. I was fascinated by this process and wanted to capture it in an object.

Glass fiber rope

Glasvezel touw.jpg Glasvezel touw 2.jpg Glasvezel touw 3.jpg


I wanted to capture the making of the rope. One of the materials that I used for my rope was glass fiber. This material is often used in combination with epoxy resin to make a strong and lightweight material. I wanted to see if I could freeze the process of the rope making by using epoxy resin to harden it. The experiment was a success. The material was very hard. But I misted the machine aspect within the object. One of the most interesting aspects was the movement. I wanted to keep this movement of the yarns in my design, so I choose not to continue with the hardening of the rope.

Rope machine "small scale"

Verticale touwmacine.jpg Verticale touw machine 2.jpg I wanted to show how rope is made. How 3 yarns are twisted together, how that rope is twisted together with 4 other ropes, and how that rope again is twisted together with 3 other ropes. This almost mathematical grid on which the yarns are tighten was very beautiful and looked architectural. I got a lot of positive reactions on this experiment but the general feedback was: Make it bigger! In order to really show the beautiful process of making rope, I had to scale it up.

large scale experiment, the yarn lenght

Grote schaal touwslaan 1.jpg


Grote schaal touwslaan.jpg Grote schaal touwslaan 3.jpg


I had noticed that when you twist the yarns to make a rope the rope is shortening in length. Before I could start making the large rope making installation, I needed to know how much length is actually lost per meter of yarn. I measured one meter of yarn and twisted it with a drill. Then I measured it again and got the amount of centimeters the yarn had shortened. The experiment was a success, I measured that one meter of yarns turns into 85 cm of rope. But I realized that the rope will shorten every time it’s twisted around each other so it will be very hard to calculate how long the yarns had to be to get a decent length of rope.

large scale experiment,attaching the yarns

Metale klossen 1.jpg Metale klossen 2.jpg

Because the machine is made of iron I wanted the spools there the yarns are attached to, to be made out of metal as well. I welded a square in which I drilled holes. In these holes I welded metal hooks for the yarns to be attach to. Because I wanted the metal squares to be able to move around the flour towards the center as the rope was being made. I made the squares out of solid steel so they would be heavy enough to keep the yarns tensed, but light enough to be able to move. To test this, I did a small scale experiment using the rig I made for my pervious rope machine.

Experiment.gif