assignment

This week was very different from others: students got to choose what their project was. Starting to think about different ways to fabricate the physical part of my electronic ukulele, I explored the avenue of creating at least part of it out of metal.

Since the neck of the guitar needed to hold my circuit board and all of its components, sheet metal would make a strong yet thin chassis. The complicated part would be bending the sheet metal to just the right surface. Then, I would also have to either create the entire ukulele out of metal or fixture this metal piece to a wooden ukulele head and body.

So, in classic how-to-make fashion, my self-defined vague assignment for this week was to cut something out of metal with the fab light and explore tools for bending sheet metal.

cutting

I started with cutting on the fablight, an insanely high-powered laser cutter to cut and engrave metal. For fun, I decided to make a little guitar-shaped christmas ornament.

The fablight path-planning software is very similar to laser cutting - it takes in a dxf and allows you to customize laser strength, material, material thickness, etc. Overall, it was extremely easy to use.

Here's a sped-up view of cutting.

And the finished cutout.

I played around with a handful of polishing tools to see what kind of surface finish I could get. The sand blaster provides the more grainey look shown in the center.

bending

The metalworking shop had a few tools for bending: one simply clamped down a sheet while you bent it around a point, creating a very tight and small-radius curve. Another was a system of rollers through which you feed the sheet of metal, guiding the sheet around the curvature of a roller and making a larger radius curve.

The piece on the right is my atempt to make a remotely guitar-neck-shaped piece. You can see the large radius curve was made on the roller, while the tight corners were made on the clamp-and-bender. The ending desired shape made it really hard to work with on the tools though, since it created a basically closed curve.

It was also very hard to cut exactly the right sized sheet of metal since the curvature is so rough. Unlike many of the computer-controlled processes in this class, the manual act of bending metal was very imprecise, and I figured it would be very challenging to get the guitar shape I wanted.

So after exploring some avenues of shaping metal, I realized it's a much more crude process and would be hard to use to make a nicely shaped ukulele neck. So, I'm going to look into other options for making the physical ukulele body.