During the first week of designing I had an idea to stretch the hair tie wide enough so that someone had enough room to pull their hair through. I started with a ring that had a hook on an extension. I thought that if I could extend the stretch of the hair tie it could allow more flexibility to get the hair through the elastic. I made a design in TinkerCad and printed it the next day. Halfway through the first print, I had to stop it because the print popped off the build plate. Because my design was thin and long, there was not enough material sticking to the build plate, so the print got loose and came off. I went back to the slicing software and added a brim to ensure that the print could adhere to the build plate better. This first print took about 40 minutes.
After I printed the ring with an extender hook, I printed just the ring with some side hooks for the hair tie to latch onto. This print took about an hour including a brim to ensure build plate adhesion. The ring concept worked well for someone to insert their hair into the opening of the ring, but I was missing the twisting aspect of tying hair up, so the elastic was not wrapping around the hair.
Later in the week, I tested both of the designs. Neither of them worked the way I wanted them to, but with the second attempt, I had a good idea of how to design the third attempt. The problem with the first design was that the ring extender was too high. I overestimated how much stretch was needed to keep the hair tie open to put the hair through. Even if I made the extension shorter, I don’t think it would’ve worked. I still can’t seem to figure out the mechanics of twisting the hair tie and that is another reason why the second design did not work as well as I thought.
These two designs helped me realize that I need to spend time figuring out the twisting mechanic of putting hair in a ponytail. I’m not sure if I would be able to make a moveable part or if I need to think about a better way to stretch the elastic for hair to go through. I have an idea for my third design, so my next ew goals will be to finish planning the design, making it in TinkerCad, and then printing it so I can test it.