Flexinol Testing

Today was straight up awesome! the muscle wire book and wing starter kit arrived and Myles and i got to it. We began by building the wing starter kit! was good fun and allowed us to see how easily it is to make some thing move using in this case very little amounts of Flexinol.


After this we started pondering about the idea of casting our own Flexinol shapes. We had a little read in the muscle wire book and it filled in the blanks, Flexinol can be cast into a shape at 300 degrees, an oven reaches 250 degrees which we decided was close enough and worth a try. It worked! after coming up with a way to hold the Flexinol in a coiled shape using a bolt and a few nuts we placed it in the oven for ten minutes on gas mark 9. We then let it cool for 5 minutes, the wire had stayed in the shape we wanted, Then we straightened it out and went on to putting it near some heat and like magic the Flexinol returned to its new shape of a coil..... satisfied.

Above is the Wing starter kit running

The video above shows Flexinol 150um in its standard form and how it reacts to heat after being scrunched up.

The video above shows how strong the Flexinol 100um wire is. Once heated the Flexinol returns to its newly formed coiled state and pulls the object up with it.

This is a clearer view of the Flexinol 100um wire doing its thing.