FeltingReel: Density Varying Soft Fabrication with Reeling and Felting

FeltingReel is a soft fabrication system that allows users to create a 3D non-woven textile with various structural strengths. Our system coils wool yarn onto a central reel to form a basic shape and uses actuated barbed needles to refine it. By controlling the coiling tension and the felting times, our system varies the density of the workpiece in a target area to achieve various structural strengths. Specifically, our system controls the tilt of coiling and felting using a Stewart platform around a motorized rotating reel. Our system also allows different basic shapes with hollow internal structures to be formed by changing the detachable reel core. We investigate the effects of different felting needles, frequencies, and coiling directions that influence the density, structural strength, and fabrication time of a workpiece. We propose three methods to combine felting and reeling. We evaluate their performances and final products by producing two example workpieces using our system. We demonstrate several objects made by our working system and discuss its capabilities and limitations.