Sweet Sucker Machine

The exhibition day was a success for me as my little inventor came along to see what I had made and really loved the final outcome. I was proud of what I had created in the time I had to do the project.

The final model of the Sweet Sucker Machine after it's been painted and sweets have been added. I also created a poster for my invention.

Assembling the model was the most enjoyable part of the process and the most difficult. I got to play around with how things would be placed and eventually made the parts to put things together. I created a tube to go through the sphere so that the sweets could go through and come out the shoot into the tray made of aluminium. I also added a funnel to the top of the sphere so sweets can be inserted through there. Theoretically, the sweets are supposed to go through the machine and the sugar is supposed to be sucked out of it therefore I added a smaller tube to the right side of the sphere where the sugar gets deposited into a sugar jar.

I set off to Hobbycraft and 4D model making store in Aldgate East to see what materials I could gather to bring the Sweet Sucker Machine to life. After a few hours of exploring the aisles of both shops, I found a few things which could aid my invention idea. The most challenging thing for me was to find something that I could use to create the dome. Originally I was thinking a gum ball machine but I found it hard to imagine how I would add the other parts of the invention on. Luckily, 4D sell plastic domes which can be taken apart so I was in luck and overjoyed when I found it. I bought a small mason jar to act as the sugar bin and a few pipes to add inside the dome for the sweets to get to one end to the other.

With the help of a friend, we went onto photoshop and a 3D modelling software called rhinoceros and decided to create a 3D model of the Sweet Sucker Machine. The challenge we faced was how we were going to fit the dome into the invention as that was a crucial part of it and Jerusha wanted that in there. However, we overcame it and decided to add a funnel to the top which was not there originally. We tried to keep the 3D model as close to the original drawing as we could.

I wanted to rework the model so I could see my options to build the model. So I redrew the model in various ways. This was mainly to make it more realistic for me as I felt like there were a lot of components within the sphere of the original design and that would be very challenging for me. So the new idea is the sphere still acting as the main component of the invention as the sweets go in there and come out of there but instead there is a funnel at the top. The sweets go in through there and go through a tube. The tube is where the sugar from the sweets get extracted. The extracted sugar falls underneath and down into test tubes which finally gets deposited into a sugar jar which can be reused.

I started off with blueprints for the invention since I had no idea where to start to bring it to life. Different parts of the model were drawn to give insight into the different parts I would have to put together. I then thought about scale and how big the model would be.  This process really helped me to actualise the idea and how it could potentially look.