Introduction: Build Your Own ""Banksy's Self-Destruct Artwork Frame"

About: Fab Lab Irbid is a small-scale workshop for personal digital fabrication, equipped with an array of flexible computer controlled tools and various materials, with the aim to make almost anything.

When the Balloon Girl self-shredded itself after hitting a 1.4 million dollars, our inner makers started analyzing how it's done.
There were 2 initial ideas in our mind:

  • The first was that blades were fixed on the base of the frame and two wheels held the painting in place and when they turned the painting would move over the blades and shred itself.
  • The second was that there was an actual paper shredder in the bottom of the painting, which would make sense giving how perfect the slices were for the actual painting and how big the frame was.

We decided to go with the first option.

Step 1: Materials and Tools.

In case you want to make your own Shredder , you'll need the following:

  1. DC Motor High torque "12 v"9V High drain battery.
  2. Razors
  3. 3D printed rollers.
  4. Metal Rods " Diameters : 12mm , 8 mm "

  5. MDF "6.5 mm"

  6. Acrylic " 6 mm" for the shredder box

  7. Arduino

  8. Bluetooth Module HC-05.

  9. H-Bridge

Step 2: Design and Manufacturing

The design goes through different steps like 3D printing, laser cutting, metal & electronics.

Drew the design on SolidWorks.

  • 3D printed parts:

We have design the rollers with different inner holes diameters, to match our different rods sizes.

The rollers are consisted of two parts:

  1. Inner rigid PLA part that was printed on Ultimaker +2
  2. Outer part that was printed on the Witbox 2 using Ninga-flex material.
  • Laser cutting parts:
  1. Shredder box : We have designed a geared system, in order to drive the two shafts at the same time with speed reduction.

Using Acrylic with "6 mm " thickness, then cut it using the Trotic speedy 400.

using the following settings:

- Speed : 0.25

- Power : 89%

- Frequency : 1000

Then we made all the shredder enclosure as shown in the pictures.

2. Body : we have designed the frame which will contain the shredder box and the painting. Using MDF "6.5 mm " thickness, and cut it using the following settings:

- Speed : 0.25
- Power : 89%

- Frequency : 1000

Step 3: Electronics

Connect the DC motor with an H-bridge, and the H-bridge was connected with the Bluetooth

The Arduino caod is attached.

Step 4: Experiment

The above video shows an experiment we did on our shredder.

The paper was cut into 6 pieces as shown.