flashing and skewers hold the abaca coils in position

Carving grooves in pink insulation foam board to cast coil designs (see previous post) seems clever, but is impractical. You would have to gouge a busy road map of grooves to have much flexibility of design. Or go through a lot of pink foam.

Our next casting idea is to use strips of aluminum flashing held in position with kebab skewers.

coil design considerations: girthy is good

Here are a couple of design sketches of the several we made. The second one is the one we went with. While the other one seems good, we wanted a girthy design with large open spaces since that would allow us to connect other elements by pulling things through the openings.

Another consideration is fragility. The first image has a neck that sticks out without much support. It probably would bend and permanently crease with the amount of abuse we give our inventory. Abaca coils are pretty strong in tension. They don’t have much compression strength, so they fold without much load. Once folded, all you have then is a loose hinge.

fencing in the coil design

Below, the coil is walled in and ready to dry. Where the coil design has an opening too small to be fitted with a flashing fence, we used taped clumps of thicker skewers to guide the drying coils.

The detail image below shows the strength of 6 hour abaca as it lifted the flashing and pulled the skewer through the pink foam floor. To adjust, we removed the skewer, repositioned the fence to allow some shrinkage and then re-skewered.

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