(Sorry for the late post – I’ve been having VPN issues with my laptop)

Copper Taffeta:

I finally got a good result on my taffeta etching!  I perfected the salt/vinegar ratio and applied the vaseline more thickly and everything came out great.  Mostly.  While running resistance tests, I wasn’t getting any readings on my multimeter.  I think that the thicker vaseline left a coating on the fabric, which is affecting the conductivity.  I’m working on one more test with thinner vaseline application and a shorter processing time to see if that gets me there.  Next steps: attach an LED and a battery to a fabric “circuit” to see how it functions, then dyeing the polyester backer on the fabric and evaluating if that affects conductivity.

Muscle Wire:

Digging a little deeper into the topic, I’ve found additional levels of complication.  Specifically, in the training of Nitinol wire.  According to many of the sites I’ve been researching, shape training Nitinol requires heating it to 500 degrees and holding it there for 25 minutes.  This sort of heating usually requires a furnace, which I don’t have.  Also, the drawback of this heating method is that it can make the wire brittle and more likely to fail when moving.  Fortunately, I found a teaching guide here which suggests an alternate heating method, via electric current.  I think this is an experiment I’ll be saving for over spring break.

However, the pre-trained Flexinol wire seems much easier to use.  In order to jump right in and make some progress, I’m going to use a tutorial from MIT’s High-Low Tech lab to create a flapping paper crane:

It’s a nice small-scale project that will allow me to get a feel for how the Flexinol functions on a substrate (paper) that is similar to fabric.  Now I just need to learn how to fold a paper crane!