May 23rd

Last Friday (May 18th) we returned to Scranton, PA to construct the prototype of our prosthetic arm. We ran into a bit of a set back when attempting to use our mold of Deepak's arm. We were told is was going to be extremely difficult and time consuming to use the mold due to the small size and resources available to us. If we had about 5 more weeks and $500 we may have considered, but instead we decided to use an old prosthetic as a starting point to build off of. With this prosthetic, we then drilled a hole approximately 3 inches from the wrist area in order to insert the bar bell:

Tyler Ryman drilling the hole into the prosthetic

The prosthetic after the hole has been drilled

After the hole was placed into the prosthetic, we then attempted to fit in the bar bell which would hold the weights in place:

Cody Bukowski fusing the bar bell with the prosthetic

Tyler Ryman helping fuse the bar bell

We then let the arm sit outside so that the resin could harden, allowing the bar bell to be firmly held inside the prosthetic. After the resin hardened, we scraped away the excess material in order to smoothen out the arm:

Allowing time for the resin to harden inside the prosthetic

Stephen DiBianca removing excess resin from the arm

We were only able to complete about 80% of the prototype during our last visit. We are revisiting next Friday in attempts to attach the screw in clamp and mushroom piece. Our hopes of building a usable prototype were not met, but we have built a prototype that will thoroughly demonstrate the goal of the prosthetic, and exemplify a very promising future of what we could further develop.