Reflection - Fuel Tank

The fuel tank brought upon many challenges and was a great way to combine the skills learnt from the previous assignments projects being the bowl, tray and torus. during the process of making the tank there were many successes and failures/things that could have been done better or approached differently.

The biggest issue the group had trouble with was trying to marry the 3 pieces of the tank together. Similarly to the tray the approach in creating the tank was to use the template and marked up paper to form a outline for a metal cutout. When this was done with the tray my partner and I cut the tray tight to the marked out line which worked well as the tray stretched and gave as the perfect amount of tolerance when forming the shape, which was then cut off with tin snips as we worked. 

On the other hand a different approach was chosen for the tank which I think was our downfall. Unlike the tray when cutting the pieces the we decided it would help if we cut the pieces larger than what the finish piece will be to give us room for any errors that may be cause during the shaping (see image below). This approach did not help as by doing this it created more work in shaping each piece than cutting it down again. It also did not assist in ensuring the pieces lined up as the original marked out lines had faded and therefore our pieces were marginally different and therefore not meeting up at the edges.

Using the original option utilized with the tray I feel would have achieved a better result with the lining the joints up.

Another issue the group faced was in relation to the finish surface of each piece. In comparison to the bowl I completed early in the semester the finish was not the same. When finishing the bowl i used a cloth methylated spirits and the English roller. The process was to roll the bowl, then take it out and wipe it with the cloth and spirits, and then to put it back in the roller and repeat the process.

Alternatively with the fuel tank the group decided to use a very fine steel wool (see image below) with methylated spirits. This worked ok but not as well as the bowls method. I feel that the finish was not the best because we didn't use the English roller during the polishing of the tanks pieces lack of an English roller made it look a lot worse than the bowl. See photo comparison below.