Compressed air shoots an abrasive — sand, glass beads, baking soda, walnut shell — at a surface to clean, etch, or texture it. The matte finish on most consumer-electronics aluminum is bead-blasted. Also strips paint, removes rust, and frosts glass.
Pneumatic propulsion of abrasive media against a workpiece. Media selection sets the result: silica sand (now restricted — silicosis hazard) for aggressive cleaning, glass bead for matte finish without dimensional change, aluminum oxide for cutting, soda for delicate stripping, walnut shell for organic-substrate cleaning.
A working library of materials and processes. Saves to this browser only — no account, no cloud.
Nothing saved yet. Open a material, process, or application and tap + project.
House vocabulary — terms ForMatter uses with intent.
Materials and processes for people who design and make things.
A local-first library of materials, processes, and applications, equal weight, citable everywhere. Part of the renato.design ecosystem — sibling of Plenum, Specimen, Ingenue, gesture, graf, and the Renato Rhino plug-ins. Form and matter, inseparable.
Half of teaching materials is teaching how the material is made into the thing. The standard subscription library was always light on that half. The wedge here isn't better samples or a prettier interface — it's treating Process as a peer entity, not a footnote.
Conway's Material World on raw materials, Lefteri's Making It on processes, Untracht and McCreight on metalsmithing, USDA Forest Products Lab on woods, GIA on gemstones, Schott / CoorsTek / Toray / Owens Corning datasheets, MakeItFrom for verifiable property numbers, ASM Handbook, ISO standards. Voice blocks: Barthes, Yanagi, Benjamin channeled within their philosophy; Lefteri verbatim. All cited.
Local to this browser. No cloud, no account, no telemetry.