2012 How to Make almost Anything

Week Two | Press Fit Drawing Machine

The pressfit drawing machine produces drawings that are determined by the change in position of colored pens. The pens are attached to flexible joints that allow for movement on and off a surface inside the box. The paper is this surface. The contributing factor to the artwork are reconfigurable plugs which enables a continues flow of line to be interrupted. Sound, by way of line, can be visualized from the intention of the user. Further more, due to the reversible nature of the machine, the same line can be repeated many times, slowly creating a composition of uncalculated error and mechanical tolerance.
MACHINE MOVEMENT
RESULTANT DRAWINGS

With press fit construction it is easy to create felxible joints. Through a careful cutting sequence you can create joints that are able to move in the desired number of directions. For this machine I was anticipating that movement in the z direction would be the most useful. I tested various methods and discovered that with cardboard flexures needed a large amount of spaceing between one another so that they can operate.

Cardboard is a surprisingly good material for flexures because it can bend without breaking. I did learn that in order for it to be optimized the grain of the carboard had to be dealt with. To get the best results i rotated my flexure 45 degrees so that i would not be cutting directly along any grain with the laser cutter.

When i placed the markeres in the center of the flexure I realized that due to the design the marke would not move straight up when moving over a bump. It instead rotated along either the x or y axis. This cahanged my project completely. Instead of the marker not drawing until it reached a bump and the raising to make a line, the marker would always be drawing a line, and would stop drawing when it came across a gate in which point it would flex upward away from the paper. This ended up being a much more elagant solution to the rules of the machine, and left me with more rich investigations.

In order to make this machine useful i needed to be able to produce multiple drawings. I used removable gates to create different compositions that the marker would use as obstacles to created drawings. The notes were cut 1/64" less than the holes so that they wouyld remain snug as the marker went over them. Each gate was the same height for this iteration. The hight of the gate related to how long the and fast the marker left the page, and more importantly to what speed the marker came boack down. I was not anticipating intensity of the markers return to the paper to have as big as an impact as it did. This was in fact the most sucessfule part fo teh project, because it created a noise and a small point of randomness in the drawings.