Earlier this week, I was wondering what kind of results we would eventually show in our poster. Today, it seems like we have an answer.
We were still scrambling as we found out that the silicone won’t cure in the resin. It worked in the first time, so why didn’t it work? The manual didn’t say anything besides it not working with resin mold.
The PDMS came later this week. Right before we started pouring the PDMS, Amy found an article about properly treating resin for use with PDMS. After investigating the recommendations in that paper, we treated the resin fingerprint molds in an oven and poured the PDMS and silicone again.
Today, we were able to get the PDMS and silicone fingerprints working! Yet my fingerprints were somewhat far from the real thing, so we scrambled again to tell a story around how this will serve as a good foundation for further work.
We made so much progress this week towards making something that will get others excited about our work. When I experience something like this week again in the future, I hope this week will give me confidence that despite uncertainty, things will work out better than expected.
The joys of research!