Play Critique

The time has come to present my current findings to my lectures. The two areas that have always been important to me is water temperature and brew time. I will show my Galileo thermometer working and how you judge brew time from the colour of the tea (this came from user testing). After displaying how to make the tea I am going to justify the choices to the materials I have chosen for my cups.

So basically I am presenting the tea set all the cups and my temperature method. Below is a 3D model displaying the materials and giving an idea of the aesthetics.

Galileo Thermometer

After the testing of my galileo thermometer and nothing going wrong with the bulbs being boiled, I went ahead and ordered bulbs to be made by Scott Glass. These are the bulbs I got back.

PICTURE

The bulb has washers hanging from it giving it a total weight of 12.4 grams with a diameter of 30 mm and wall thickness of 0.3mm (these are rough sizes)

With these sizes and weight the bulb would sink and boiling and float a around 84 C

Cast Iron

For one of the cups I will be using cast iron. So I spent a lot of time trying to find a place that casts with iron. I tried powder hall in edinburgh first. Powder hall mainly casts in bronze, they do use other metals but iron is not one of them. The next company I tried was Ballantine Boness, this company specialises in cast iron perfect for my cup. After contacting the company they informed me that to make the cup it will cost me £800.... a bit out of my price range.

Plan B for the cup was to source Iron myself and have the cup lathed as much as possible to my design and have the cup finished by a cnc lathe.

So more to come on the progress of this cup.

Dead Ends

As my time runs out and my electronic skills do not seem to be growing I have been forced to look towards other alternatives of telling your tea is ready.

I have mentioned before that a tea company Suki tea gave me there tea bible and inside it tells the reader how to judge your tea is ready by the colour it produces. This method was also mentioned to me by my tea tasters, we should be keeping an eye out for the water changing colour.

To do this with a glass cup would be easy as you can see the tea clearly and easily. From my pictures I posted up about my form you can see a few cups have a white interior and this white interior will show the colour of the tea a lot better.

For time the user will judge the tea and its colour to tell when the tea is ready instead of using a timer.

Cup Testing

After previously testing my cups and choosing a form the heat retention was between 2:52 and 2:45 but to up that heat time I found an old tea preparation method known as Gong Fu which can be seen here.

http://jingtea.com/teaware/tea-sets/glass-gong-fu-set

The idea of this method is too pour boiling water in to all your cups to heat them. While the hot water in your kettle cools the cup heats. When the kettle water reaches the temperature required the water heating the cup is poured away and water from the kettle is used to fill the cup again with the tea for brewing.

This method increased the cup heat time up to .....

Porcelain cups

After playing with my form using engineering foam on the lathe I was able to take one of my models and use it to make a mould for producing porcelain cups. Below are pictures following roughly the stages of the process.

First thing to do for producing a mould is to have a sheet of set plaster to section off the top and bottom halves of the model. The to halves will be separately casted to complete the mould. The sheet of plaster was held up by clay and the plaster was boxed in and sealed using clay so the the liquid plaster does not run out.


The top of the model was cast in plaster first and left to set for 15 min. The same process was copied for the bottom half of the model to produce a complete mould.
The mould takes four days to dry out then will be ready to have porcelain poured in.

Heat Solution

Identified earlier when testing my clay cups there was a problem with picking up the hot cups without handles.