Ten Pounds of Wood, Cement and Epoxy - That's It.

How much can you get into ten pounds anyway? I am trying to make a shingle by recycling some previously used screen printing frames. This "shingle" also needs to serve as a wall structure and decorative art piece in order to build a curved protective shelter for outside use. I have gotten pretty far along with the concept, but each time I think I am ready for protection I either run out of money or rethink the materials and try to make it a little better. Often I end up back where I started, but still there are minor changes, hardly recognizable to the human eye, that make the differences worth the effort. Durability, detail, cost and weight are the main factors that I am trying to balance with these photo fresco composite frames that are now shingles, but the invisible agent is also adhering them together.

Recently I went through a test where I applied rice paper to the back of setting epoxy and it looked great, for awhile. I left them on a pile outside in the weather and slowly they started to curve and bend. I left them for a couple of weeks and came back to find them curled over like a Fortune Telling Fish and the two materials were literally cracking apart from each other and the epoxy was breaking away from the paper. On the surface this looked like a good idea with the rice paper providing a thin structure to support the epoxy and potentially a texture or surface for more epoxy or adhesive to attach to, but it didn't work. This is the case over and over again with different materials and until they go through an exhaustive test it is hard to feel comfortable that things will work in the wide range of physical environments that shingles will find themselves in.

I am more of a craft person and kind of an artist more so than I am a structural engineer. This means the limits of my ability to create a product for the real world have probably been reached, but by trial and error I am working out the details and hacking together a shingle structure that should work as good as a kid's playhouse and be as durable as a shelter at an Occupy protest campsite. Which brings to mind the other characteristic that I would like to employ and that is modular. I love the idea that the frames could be taken apart and transported quickly and easily, thus making them tent-like too. I know this is too much to expect from ten pounds of wood, cement and epoxy, but I think I am very close to making that happen.