Cutting day 3

Well its been a massive day but it is not over for me. I am rushing to post the progress from day 2 and writing out todays progress before work in 25 minutes so it might be best to save this as a draft.

Right, progress as normal for cutting out the balloon. We managed to cut 60 panels again which means we are sitting at the 160/300 mark which is officially over half way! Because of time constraints we are not really getting as far i would of hoped. Due to my cutting location being open from 8am-5pm only on week days it means we are only really fitting 6 or 7 hour days in which  is my fault for not squezing more out of the day.

Initally i went in with the goal to knock this out in two days which is realistic for some however having 20 gores is a lot of fabric to cut cleanly/accurately in one swipe. If you look at it in that respect you can gauge why i havent met my pre cutting prediction of 2 days.

That wraps up this weeks cutting session. I am planning on cutting next week. Hopefully i will be able to knock out the last panels in a lengthy day. Sadly returning to the smaller panels at the top of the balloon this time wont speed up progress as i will be searching through my off-cut bag which i will hopefully reduce the amount of wastage.

On a side note i talked to a friend of mine which i have mentioned the fabric to in a pervious discussion and he is very interested. He works at a balloon manufacturer and would like to do a variety of tests (pull strength, tear test, porosity and water test) on each type of fabric i have. Hopefully the tests will give an insight into the make up of the fabric and give us an idea of its expected life.

Cutting Day 2

Day 2 of cutting turned out to be a productive day with 60 panels being cut which takes the total tally to 100/300. My assistant for the day was busy and didn't get in until 12 which meant I had 3 hours to myself. In this time I managed to cut the remaining lengths for panels J K along with all the lengths for J. 

The panels are getting larger now so progress will slow down slightly and once we get towards the top I will being raising the off cuts to see if I can salvage any fabric. 

So at the completion of day 2 I have panels J, K, L, M and N cut. 20 lengths of panel I prepared for layering/ cutting. With day 3 bringing in Katie to help I hope we can push through panels G, H and I which will put me past the half way mark of cutting. 

Cutting Day 1

So after taking a week to contemplate cutting i finally decided to start cutting this week. Day one saw a lot less progress than i initially thought we would of made however towards the end of the day we were rocketing along. Which was cut short by my awesome assistant Tim having to head to work.

We managed to cut out panels M and N which totals 40 panels. Tim and I laid the fabric to the length of the two panels and cut the sheet to length. This was repeated 5 times per colour to create 20 sheets which we then cut the M and N panels in sets of 10 layers.
We also managed to cut out 17/20 lengths for panels L and K which will be the last double panel length until we get into the smaller C,B,A panels which i plan on using the lengths which had defects that would of either visually affected it or structurally towards the end of its life.  Hopefully the smaller panels will fit around the variety of defects i found which was mostly on the black.

Sadly i didn't measure the length of fabric which has been benched for now but it was about 8 meters however majority of this is still salvageable.

The team over in Australia are pushing through sewing up Barbs 60k at the moment which is pushing me to make my own progress. Its busy times at the moment for XLTA Australia with one balloon at the final stages, another having trouble with Gores but has a weekend planned to push some progress and a couple back either in the planning/cutting stages.

Tomorrow for me however brings Neil in to hopefully help me for another 5 or 6 hours which will no doubt help see some more garbage bags filled with fully cut panels and my cutting checklist slightly more fulfilled.

Patterns done!

During my days off last week i completed my patterns which ended up taking two days because i mostly drew them up solo and called Katie over to help rule lines which in theory wasn't very efficient as i could of just cut the line straight away but a few times i discovered some short falls and wrongly ruled lines.

As i mentioned before the program i have used for this design spits out all the measurements required for each panel and gives me all kinds of numbers such as material requirements and pricing etc.

One of the discoveries i found in the research and development stage of the project is the program i am using spits out DXF files which is a autoCAD format. It displays a 2d drawing to scale of each panel therefore i converted the DXF to PDF which gave me a printable version. This gave me a idea of the shape, measurements and make up of each panel which in turn made it a hell of a lot easier.

So with the panels all cut on the second day which surprising took longer than i had thought i am now ready to cut fabric. A very daunting and scary prospect i must say. Its a hard feeling to describe you are cutting into something that you know has required X work and Y money but you need to cut in order to achieve the goal. Once i start cutting the first cut of panels i will be fine however screw ups are inevitable and no doubt ill learn a few things a long the way.

On a final note you are all probably wondering where the hell i am cutting. I talked about building my own cutting table which Katie said screw that Torpedo7 has tables used for packing. Just come and use one of those. So only on week days and the days i have spare i go to Collins road to make some progress. Hopefully i wont be there much longer but someone said to me on the phone last night, "Plan on it taking 2 days a week for a month. You may think it will be a 2 day job but let the days and hours happen".