Busy modeling and bring lots of concepts together.

This was prompted by a trip to the Hemp farm at Driffield and a chat with Nick Voase.

Nick and I chatted about my project and whilst doing so viewed products [Love a walk and talk]that he had developed, one of which was a fuel bracket made from hemp.

I observed how closely packed the fibres were, one of the plastic films, packaging the bricks had split, I saw how some of them swelled when moisture got into them.

One of the hemp samples shown was almost a dust, it was waste from the machines, this gave me the idea of grinding the hemp fibres down. I first did this in my coffee grinder, it worked once and then blunted it.

I revisited molding the fibre, but this time using fibre from the fuel bricks designed for wood burners, I soaked it first to release the fibres.

I was still persistent in creating multiple uses for my tray, so during the making I introduced the mushroom spaw plus cress seeds.

These models where a complete fail. I needed a binder for the waste hemp fibre.

I later introduced the potato starch. This was also to add a glossy finish and act as an oxygen barrier. I did this recognising that to preserve food a gass barrier is needed. Polymer is currently used for this reason.These models ( images below) did leed me on to the idea of using a press, the inclusion of coffee granules and the use of fibre from the hemp bricket made me think of the Areopress coffee espresso maker and the way it forms a small round solid shuttle cock type shape from the pressure. I later made a version to model a tray.

Compressing the fibres to make a tray would work in industry, however i am struggling to emulate this form of manufacture at home to make the tray walls thin enough.

The images below show me using a sieve this idea was initiated by watching a you-tube video on egg box manufacture.

unfortunately I don’t have photo’s of the Hemp farm, understandably whilst they are very open to sharing information photographs on site are not permitted.