This past week, my team experienced a lot of stalls and struggles in our project’s progress, yet despite these frustrations and challenges, the week was brightened by significant support from others in the internship. A lot of the week involved waiting for materials to arrive and trying to figure out which materials to order. We were still trying to find ways to attach interchangeable labia/hymen sets to the cylinder on the base for rotation, and found little luck at Lowe’s or with our bayonet mounts we were attempting to create. Later in the week, with the help of Grant, we decided on a mason jar-esqe design with the labia and hymen attached to a flat cap with a rim that screws on to attach them to the cylinder. One team member also spent a significant amount of time expanding the labia mold CAD file into an oval shape to have more skin on the sides only to be told by the client that the circle mold was preferable. On the materials side, we began experimenting with thin silicone rubber molds in order to make the hymen look realistic and hopefully be able to move and fall when stretched and when put in supine versus prone positions. This task proved very difficult and after gaining a thorough understanding of the true complexity of this movement and creating it with lifelike materials, my team has decided that it is very possible this is outside the scope of our summer internship. We received support from our TAs and Grant upon drawing this conclusion, and while we hope to experiment with modeling hymens if we have time later in the internship, we want to prioritize the base, rotation, attachment mechanisms, and labia since we have a strong foundation and direction for those components. I began attempting to create a Adobe Illustrator file for our base, and while two members of another team very kindly helped my find a template online, I still need to work on editing that to fit our base’s unique purposes and design. It has been difficult trying to figure this out, but hopefully coming in next week with a fresh pair of eyes will help. Despite the challenges of this past week, our team remains hopeful for what we can accomplish over these next few weeks.
On a fun note, this week all the interns coordinated to wear red on Tuesday and we got some really cute pictures out of it! Also, we met with a gynecologist from the Texas Medical Center to help us decide on materials and assess our model, and she said the labia looked really realistic and the Ecoflex 30 (the silicone rubber we had been leaning towards) definitely seemed like the best material from the silicone sample set we had, so that was encouraging! My team and I are looking forward to pushing forward to a more finalized prototype and getting to share all our work in the coming weeks!
