Final modelling for the CNC router and booklet - Rob, w/ Simon
there was stil a lot of hand sanding to make things fit perfect though.
there was stil a lot of hand sanding to make things fit perfect though.
Simon, Jess and I returned to Hanson Court for a site visit to measure out the balcony space on a typical room.
Unfortunately what we found was the council balconies were constructed so the metal railing and the outside wall were not flush; the railing was wider than the wall. Meaning, in order for our brackets to sit over the rail, they wouldn't sit flat against the wall.
After talking with Jono about this, Simon and I decided to go with a more generalised approach, making a bracket large enough to fit and then making adaptors/wedges to sit behind the wall if necessary.
The compost draw in the end got scrapped from the design. The process of making it was extremely difficult, and in the end the idea of the table itself changed and there was no need for a compost draw to be on the final design.
Denailing. A LOT.
Boards being planed and thickened.
Looking at bracketing systems that are already on the market.
Boards after being cleaned up.
Luke sanding the top of the CNC routed top.
Jess doing biscuit joins.
Luke. Dremmeling out some of the finger holes.
Building the frame for the mock-up balcony.
This concept combines the idea's of furniture, balconies and gardening to create a unique personal gardening unit for balconies.
The concept is a table that mounts onto an outdoor balcony. It houses two planter boxes, one deeper than the other, and with one that hangs over the edge of the baclony. The table acts as a food preperation area, with a slight gradient that goes down to a trapdoor to a compost bin. This bin allows waste to be re used on the plants in the garden, with compost and water fertiliser being collected in it.
Problem:
We found that the problem was that the people of these flats had no personal garden spaces. To combat this we thought a balcony garden would be the best idea. Using hydroponics they could grow their own garden right on the balcony.
Hydroponics:
Growing plants in a water holdings with no or little soil.
Positives of Hydroponics:
Negatives
While hydroponics has many advantages for an avid gardener, we found with our research that this would not be suitable for tenants of these flats. So we re thought our ideas and looked at the features of what we wanted to include in the hydroponics garden, to see what we could carry over to our new design.
Originally we wanted a workbench area attached to the garden to make it an all in one experience and acitivity. We would still use this idea, and have planter boxes that look much the same as the original concept, but without the hydroponic kit.
A compost bin would be added to this workbench area and would be an important feature as it would encourage recycling and be reusable on their garden.