Sources And Origins

Nothing in a workshop starts as a sheet. The acrylic on the rack was a fraction of a barrel of crude oil pumped out of rock; the aluminium was red mud dug out of a hillside; the plywood was a tree; the card was a plantation of fast growing timber and, in some mills, straw. Between each of those and the material you can actually cut sits a process, and that process is where most of a product's cost, most of its energy and most of its footprint were already decided before a designer touched it.

This lesson covers the primary sources of materials and the main processes that convert them into workable forms. You will learn how cellulose fibres are obtained from wood and grasses and converted into paper; the seasoning and conversion of timber and how manufactured timbers are produced; the extraction and reduction of metals from their ores; and the refining of crude oil by fractional distillation and cracking to give the feedstock for polymers. The specification asks for this in depth for at least one material area, so learn all four to recognition standard and the one you build in properly. This is specialist technical principles content, examined in Section B of Paper 1, where it supplied questions 18.1 and 18.2 of the specimen paper.