So I recently got an idea from the Tapioca Challenge trend going on. Being a dude, it’s a little difficult to do it how it’s supposed to be done so I chose to use the assistance of some magnets. The main plan was to have a central 3d printed base that houses the magnets, holds the tapioca balls, and takes up volume to minimize the amount of silicone needed.
For casting the half balls, I used a router bit to make round cutouts in a piece of wood and mixed up some silicone to form them. Black acrylic paint was used to color the silicone.
This is the bottom half with the half spheres super glued on. Not shown but I painted over in semi gloss acrylic paint to darken them up a bit more.
This is almost the final part before adding the straw and pouring the silicone. I used acrylic paint to match the color of milk tea and the realism test from that is shown below. The trick was using bright orange acrylic to brighten up the color.
With the color all set, I added part b and poured it in the cup. I didn’t want to drive 45 minutes to where I had a real vacuum pump so I just removed most of the bubbles by hand. There are a few visible from close up but overall it looks pretty good. As for having it stick to me, I bought a cheap GoPro chest mount and epoxied some more neodymium magnets to it.
That’s it for now. I’m currently working on another rocket so I will hopefully be posting a bit more often.
TT3D 