Our second assignment was to make something that we could make out of pieces cut using either the Vinyl cutter, Laser cutter or Water-Jet cutter. We were not allowed to use any fasteners or glue, so we had to make the pieces snap together using some kind of press-fitting method or mechanical joint.

      The first step was to find what to do. Since I’m taking archery classes and, I don’t have a bow, I decided to make myself a bow! First I downloaded some pictures to use as a guide for the drawings.

 

      Then I drew the outline of the bow handle using Corel Draw. I accomplished this by first changing the image to a black and white bitmap and raising the image threshold to get the outline of the figure. this is the result.

  

 

     Once done with the drawing I had to cut the parts for the handle and the limbs. I cut the Bow Handle from a large piece of compressed cardboard using the Waterjet cutter, and the limbs with the laser cutter. You can see a picture of the Waterjet cutter here.

 

 

      Finally, after wasting like a ton of material, burning a slab of polycarbonate with the laser cutter, changing the design a ton of times (because of lack of material…) and spending not less than 18 hours non-stop at the lab, I got this final result: