Melt | Remelt

Domestic fabrication during COVID; at MIT, 2021

This project attempts to use everyday material to reshape everyday space, through small-scale domestic fabrication. During the peak of Covid, with no access to school facilities, a desktop CNC machine, “Tiny Z”, was assembled from scratch at home. Wax was chosen because of its aesthetic quality, and the fact that it can be transformed almost indefinitely by heat, producing very little waste during the experiment. Tiny Z was hacked into a wax sculptor, with an off-the-shelf pyrography pen, customized 3D printed hardwares, controlled by G-code. This petite machine allows extremely delicate 3D carving and surface patterning that larger CNCs cannot achieve. A workflow of “melt-remelt” is developed to make tiny doubly-curved wax bricks with unique texture, which altogether transform a spatial threshold at home. This project was not finished.

Special thanks to instructor Zain Karsan