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 to experiment with. It is light, soft, amorphous, and easily transformable by heat, therefore creates minimal waste. 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. However, due to the restrictions of my rental agreement, the project was not realized at its full capacity...

Special thanks to instructor Zain Karsan