Agyness Deyn's Mobius House exists without a site.  It floats and spins above the ground like a multicoloured windmill, going where the breeze takes it.

Mobius Font

During the many hours of watching the components print it occurred to me that several of the components looked like letters.  Furthermore they so happened to be almost all the letters in 'Agyness'.  I decided that I would attempt to create a font based around the shape of the Mobius House section.

High Resolution Image Gallery

Component Fabrication Attempt #25

With the issues I've had getting a useful form out of blue foam I decided to just manually use a knife and some sandpaper to create the spheres.  They aren't exactly spherical, but are good enough for what I needed them for.

VERDICT:  SUCCESS

Constructing the Mobius #7

As simple as the fabrication process was for the pool rings, the assembly was just as easy.  A bit of glue and they stuck in place without any worries.

Component Fabrication Attempt #24

To be fair, this was an easy one.  The rather complicated mesh pool element was simplified into concentric rings, which were easily laser cut.  In the end it was such a simple fabrication process it seems unfair to give it its own number.

VERDICT:  SUCCESS

Component Fabrication Attempt #23

I had a second acrylic pool element that I had laser cut, but not assembled because of the difficulties I had with the first attempt.  I don't really know what was different, the shapes were similar and I had similar settings when exporting, however this time the pieces didn't fall apart quite so much, and assembly was much easier.

While I was satisfied with the result, I had already changed the scheme for the pool such that this particular element was no longer necessary.

VERDICT:  SUCCESS

Component Fabrication Attempt #22

I didn't really have time to fabricate a complicated rig for making accurate blue foam spheres, however I did try to make something reasonable simple.  The guides are able to be swapped out for different radius spheres.  I intended to use it to round off hand made spheres for an added level of accuracy.  However it didn't work, and I got better results by hand.

VERDICT:  FAILURE

Suspended Liquids

Here is a videos which shows the concept that was the inspiration for my pool.  Using sound waves liquid droplets can be suspended in space in sort of rows of tiny spheres.  I thought it would be cool, at least conceptually if you could swim through these droplets, moving between them, diving in and out as you and the water is suspended in space.  I understand it is not physically possible, but I have bent the laws of physics to accommodate the mobius design, it seems only right I do it for the pool too.

The Pool Remastered

After Russell showed us the house in class with the cantilevered pool I realised that a supermodel's house is not complete without a swimming pool.  You can see my earlier attempts here and here, however the shape wasn't all that fluid and the way in which I tried to fabricate it failed.

Here are some of my attempts to generate a form that is more in line with the existing mobius shape.

The Rainbow Roof

While perhaps not my personal taste in colour I really felt the house of a super model, specifically Agyness Deyn, needed to be bold, vibrant and colourful.  Check out my earlier post, Agyness in Colour, to see where some of this inspiration came from.  There was a little bit of a limitation on the colours I could use, as the range of coloured acrylic is not all that extensive, but there was enough to cover all the primary and secondary colours.

I mentioned earlier that I bought the acrylic as a store called Plastix which is out near the airport, about a 15-20 minute drive from the uni.  They were quite friendly and had my order ready about 3 hours after I placed it.

Constructing the Mobius #6

Here is a construction video I attempted where I have added to coloured roof elements to the model.  I used an app called 'Lapse It', set the photo interval to 5 seconds and then masking taped my phone to the ceiling.  I have the advantage that my ceilings are only about 2m high and so putting up and taking down the camera was reasonably easy.  The song is 'She's a Rainbow' by the Rolling Stones, considering the colour scheme I thought it appropriate.

Constructing the Mobius #5

So I came back to the mobius with a clear mind and decided that with a bit of tweaking I could make it work.  I split the model into quarters again with a knife, I then removed the joining pins and pegs from the plastic pieces.  This allowed me to twist each segment slightly further that I intended to enable to last pieces to line up better.  Splitting, cutting, twisting and gluing enough of the pieces eventually made it line up when I put the final piece in place and with enough elastic bands I finally had something, that when the glue dried, would be a complete and continuous mobius strip.  There are a few bits within the model where it is possible to tell that it hasn't lined up completely accurately, but this was a sacrifice I had to make.  I am hoping that after the roof elements are in place the inaccuracies will become slightly less obvious.

Constructing the Mobius #4

So the larger the pieces got the more difficult it became to get them to glue together, but with some clever rubber band manipulation I managed to get them to hold in place.

I had this fear the entire way through construction that I would get to the end and things would not line up and the whole process would have been a gigantic waste and the settings I used on the Makerbot weren't good enough to get the mathematical precision needed to ensure the mobius worked correctly.

Unfortunately my fears were proven founded as I tried to put the last piece in place and discovered it didn't fit.  At this point I felt like throwing the whole thing onto the floor in rage.  Instead I put it down and walked away and decided I'd try and fix it later.

A Desk of Mess

Despite the fact I deliberately tried to keep things organised during construction, things always seem to get a little messy.  Also Diet Coke helps with the long hours of model making.

Constructing the Mobius #3

So the next stage was connecting the ground of three together with one of the even pieces to create larger groups of seven to nine.  These were a little trickier as the larger the components got the harder they were to hold together with elastic bands.  I had to thread them over and under and through just to get them to pull with enough force in the right direction to hold the larger groups in the right direction as the glue set.

Dremel Experimentations

Just mucking around with etching, engraving, boring and drilling shapes and holes into blue foam with a dremel.  I don't actually have all that many attachments, so the shape making is a little limited.  I don't really have time to perfect it for house 1, but I will be looking at making some jigs for house 2 to allow sculpting of blue foam.

Laser Etching #2

After my attempt of laser etching with the Tintin image I decided to give it another go with an image which was more or less just black and white linework.  This is a portion of a larger drawing I did last semester which I thought would etch well.  This time I tried it on MDF with protective masking tape.  It required a bit of tweaking with the settings to get the right engraving depth, and with the masking tape across the top it was quite difficult to tell if it worked.  After I removed the tape I found the lines a little light, but it still looks pretty good.

Constructing the Mobius #2

I'll take a bit of time out here to go through the process of preparing the pieces for assembly.

Much of the support structure can be removed by hand.  I a lot of cases the pins and pegs I had built into the plastic pieces to line them up with the MDF ribs came off with the support structure, which was a little annoying, but each component had 6 of these, and there were only 1 or 2 instances where all of them came off.

The next stage require tidying up any erroneous support structure pieces with a knife.  Often the guide pins and pegs required cleaning up too so they would fit better into the holes in the MDF.

Finally liberal amounts of PVA glue were applied to each piece.

It was a little frustrating that I had to spend so much time preparing each of my 36 components.  I had hoped that it would be a more simple process of the pieces just snapping together, however the Makerbot replicator was not able to provide pieces with this sort of accuracy.

Constructing the Mobius #1

I'm going to break this down into a few different parts, as this process took about 3 days, and there were a number of issues with just getting the mobius shape together.

The first part was to clean up my big pile of mdf, acrylilc and plastic.

Before

After

With this out of the way I then could begin assembly.  I started by attaching the MDF ribs onto either side of the odd numbered pieces, and then using an even piece to create groups of three.

It must be said that elastic bands were my saviour in this, as I was using PVA glue, which had about a 20 minute dry time and I would not have been able to hold the pieces together for this long.