Experiments with wire forms

Recently, I've been experimenting with creating a form which acts as a guide for wire. You wrap the wire around, get it out and have a nice shape, which would take a lot of skills to create by hand. This would allow virtually everyone to create their own wire decoration with complicated shapes.

My inspiration was this pot and the first idea is to create a pen holder with wires in similar curves.

https://www.printables.com/model/834831-sand-dune-plant-pot-and-planter-vase-mode-design

Designing first prototypes was simple. Turns out AI as a guide with combination of several opensource programs (blender, inkscape, freecad, gimp) can go a long way with very little effort. It's true that I have experience in all the aforementioned apps, but it's been years since I used them and AI helped me to find exactly the functions I needed and told me how to use them. It wasn't perfect, but I was able to learn a few things and click through 'til the final model. Certainly a lot better solution than my original plan to model all this in freecad (thanks to reddit users who pointed me in this direction).

However, it turned out to be quite a challenge to model a cylinder with creases, that would provide sufficient guidance for the wire to stay in place and at the same time would be easy to take out from the final product.

I brainstormed a few ideas:

• several parts that lock in together
• the form will be applied from the outside
• the user will have to bend the wire out and then back
• the creases will be curved, so that the wire can only go one way
• it'll be 2d form and the wire alone will be bend around a bare cylinder
• And a lot of other wilder ideas.

I've been stuck on this problem for quite a while, so I'm happy that I was able to make some progress instead of coming with yet another design how the final curves will look. I really need to first find the way to create this form. To come up with a general principle how to design these, before I can move on.

For now, I've settled on experimenting with different shapes of the creases, hoping it'll just work. I'll figure out later if it's even financially viable, the forms showed to be a bit more costly then I'd anticipated.

Anyway, that's it for today. I'll get back when I move things further.