Crafting Material Interfaces

I decided for this week’s assignment to take up the second brief, and thoroughly investigate the various properties and possibilities of my choice of material.

I followed up on last week’s assignment to see if commercially available metal-filled polymers might be conductive and might be flexible enough to use as either a thin conductive plate or, when applied to a piece of paper, form part of a conductive paper material.

I bought JD Weld’s Steel Stik, a steel-filled non-rusting epoxy, JD Weld’s Kwik and a Commercial Electric auto-range multimeter.

I started with the Steel Stik, a putty stick with a consistency not unlike stiffened dough.

The surprise for me is that the material is unmixed. The steel putty is at the core, surrounded by the hardener. The instructions require kneading the required amoun until thoroughly blended, before use.

The knead mixture cures in 5 minutes and under, and one must work quickly in order to shape it into its desired thickness and shape. The first time I tried, I took too long, and it hardens into a solid, inflexible compound.

Using a rolling pin, I tried to spread the mixture out as much as I can, but I did not get very far. It retained a thickness of approximately 2.5 to 3mm. At this thickness, the cured steel-filled epoxy was not flexible at all, and I don’t imagine that it would be useful either has a thin plate conductive surface or blended in with other non-polymer materials such as paper pulp.

What was a surprise was its conductivity. Using the multimeter set at the mega-ohms range, it gave no reading at all.

I tested a second material, the Cold Weld, which in its liquid form is much more easy to spread.

I manage to spread this into a layer approximate 1mm thick. Once this is cured, there is some flexibility, but not so much that it can bend without breaking. It too gave no reading at all on the multimeter. From a link discussing similar materials on the 3M website, conductivity of suitable metal-filled polymer surfaces is only in the order of 10⁹ to 10¹¹ ohms/square.