We began the week on Monday completing the mold for our samples. We discovered we couldn’t remove our initial samples from the PVC tubing mold. We had to change our molding strategy. We spent the latter half of Monday and the first half of Tuesday creating a Plexiglas molding that enabled us to easily remove our specimens. We visited Oleg in the basement who provided a big help in prototyping and creating our mold. We also cut some of Kathy’s hair (she’s in the Soil laboratory), cleaned it with acetone, and cut it into 3mm pieces (see photo). We then began crafting our samples using cement, fly ash, and glass microspheres for part 1 of the research. Unfortunately, we discovered on Thursday that we used the wrong fly ash for our samples; we used Class C fly ash instead of Class F fly ash. The densities of the two classes vary significantly, which plays a major role in our research. We then remade our part 1 samples using the Class F fly ash. To get ahead on the research, we closed out the week by making the samples for part 2 of our research, which included human hair.