Week 3 - Computer Controlled Cutting
Experiments with the Vinyl Cutter, Laser Cutter, and creating an construction kit.
Group Assignment
Laser Cutter
My first attempt was etching a design on a cardstock paper. It reminded me of the Dr. Evil scene “lasers”. This was an interesting experiment because the honeycomb at the bottom of the laser machine was off. You can tell from the bottom left of the etching.
Vinyl Cutting
The vinyl cutter was fairly straight forward. What was not straightforward, was getting the overlay correct. I designed the egg sticker, and was not concerned about getting the overlay 100% correct, and I think it looks really cool with each being slightly skewed.
I laser cut an outline of the original drawing to help me place the stickers a little better.
Construction Kit
This project was fun, and I wish I had more time to dedicate to experimenting. Our FabLab was closed in the beginning part of the week, and just designing my pieces in 2D wasn’t giving me enough contextual information as to whether it would all work.
For my construction kit, I sought to make wings. I’m a little disappointed with how they turned out, but I think I just need a little more time to make more pieces. It took me a while to wrap my head around how things would fit together, and how to get everything to work. I spent a lot of time to draw out my ideas, experimenting, and prototyping how to make what I had envisioning, but in the end, it kinda didn’t work as I had thought.
Getting the parametric variables and the constraints/dimensions was straightforward. I created slotWidth and slotHeight to help me make all the slots the same size. In sketch mode, you can use the D shortcut to use the Dimensioning tool in order to set the size of things.
I tried the slot fitting, but had a hard time with it. The cardboard was not very forgiving.
I also wanted to experiment with the living hinges. Some are really beautiful, and I thought it would be cool to use for the feathers.
My first test didn’t work, the design was too close together. Using a straight cutting pattern worked better.
