Gold Awards

Just to keep things tidy, here's a post about a competition I entered in March 2014, for "Gold Awards" for the Association of Colleges (AoC).

These awards are handed to high-achieving (famous)  graduates from colleges belonging to the AoC at a flash dinner in the House of Commons. 

Every year, the AoC invites students to come up with a design.  Plymouth College of Art's Jeff Norwood won it in 2013 with a sand-cast glass proposal.   

The AoC wanted 14 awards for 2014.  The brief stipulated that the design had to include the words "AoC Gold Awards 2014" and should incorporate "gold or gold colour" in the design.

As it happened, I'd made some trophies for my running club by pouring molten glass into a graphite mould into which I'd placed half a trophy cup in steel that I'd got Noah Taylor to turn on a lathe for me at Flameworks, the college metals workshop at the time.

Here's the outcome:

For more on how I made this please click on this link.

For the AoC awards,  I proposed doing the same thing but creating a hollow acorn inside the glass -  a reference to  "mighty oaks from little acorns grow" which seemed appropriate for the awards:

It didn't get anywhere and I didn't get any feedback apart from encouragement to try again in 2015.

Personally, I think the idea was good but the way I presented it, as a 2D drawing, let me down.  I didn't communicate the lovely circular surface ripples in the trophies I'd actually made, and really, the only way to do that was to make a prototype.

Since then, I've been trying to figure out how to create a steel half acorn so that I could make a prototype.  

I drew one using Rhino (3D modelling software) and got a quote for 3D printing it in "stainless steel" from i.materialise, a Belgian company offering 3D printing services.  From memory it was around £30, but I noticed that the printed "stainless steel" was laid down in a way that raised questions about its melting point - specifically whether it could withstand molten glass being poured on it, which comes out of the furnace at 1,000 degrees Celsius.

I asked i-materialise and was told that its stainless steel would start to soften at 700 degrees C, so I shelved the idea.

Later on, I discussed it with Ian Hankey, the lecturer in charge of the PCA's "Fab Lab" who suggested testing a piece of scrap from i.materialise.   In the end I bought a sample of printed stainless steel from them.

It's tiny!  That's my finger underneath it.  I plan to pour molten glass on it fairly soon.  I will remove my finger first!

I also need to experiment with sand blasting or engraving the oak leaves.  That's going to have to wait until I've finished my carrot project.