THE CHAIN-HEAD PROJECT

IN COLLABORATION WITH DUNA USA

We are so excited to share the entire fabrication process for this project. From an 8-inch-tall maquette to an 8-feet-tall finished piece, we present to you the Chain-heads!

“All art tells a story and the story that this piece tells is a far too common one these days. Almost 2 years into a global pandemic, we’ve all had a lot of time for self-reflection. Being able to look back at our own lives, the good and bad days, and how they all turn into this entire chain of events. This piece was meant to bring all of those good, bad, sad, and pleasant days together into one powerful image.”

The Streamline team had the pleasure of teaming up with DUNA USA on this collaborative project that shows both the capabilities of the FROG3D ® system and the benefits of working with DUNA’s high-quality materials.

For this project, we provided our design brief to an amazing local artist in order to turn our vision into reality using sculpting clay and their never-ending talent.

We then used the FROGScan™ Flash white light scanner to scan the clay maquette and produce a digital 3D model that we could then bring into our FROG4D™ indexing software to generate the toolpaths for our FROGMill™ CNC router.

For this project, we decided to use Duna’s 4-pound closed-cell CORAFOAM, R40 material, which is light enough to manage as a massive block but strong enough to hold up to the machining process without breaking.

After assembling the two provided blocks into one monolithic block, we mounted it to the FROGMill™, and with the extreme reach of our FROGTools™, we quickly had the majority of material machined away, allowing us to use a smaller bit to capture the details.

Once the machining was completed, we used some hand tools to redefine some of the areas that did not scale up as we wanted due to the size of the original clay sculpture. Usually, the next step would be to apply a hard coat using a plural component spray system such as the FROGSkin™, but with DUNA’s high-density material, we were able to skip this step entirely. We applied a high-build primer to prep the surface and followed up with the final paint coating.

The end result is an amazing art piece, standing at a full 8’ tall, with no required armature. Between the easy to work with materials and the enhanced capabilities of the FROG3D ® fabrication system, this project was both fun and rewarding and is now another amazing example of what material engineering and automation can achieve.