how to make (almost) anything

Computer-controlled Cutting

Week 2 Tools/Resources:
Vinyl cutter
Laser cutter
Grasshopper notch tutorial

Laser cutter: Course Flare

For the vinyl cutting portion of the week's assignment, I made stickers to ID my course notebooks this semester. The vinyl supply in the Architecture shop has some bold choices in the color department, and I began the project by thinking about ways the multiple colors could interact. I ended up designing a finger-like edge by which the different colors could thread together, and from a distance, interact to create a third color.

Laser Cutter: Press Fit Kit

For the laser cutter, I designed a construction kit of press fit parallelograms. As this was my first time dipping my toe into the world of grasshopper, I spent a good amount of time this weekend working through a great intro tutorial on setting up a script to parametricise notches for the kit. I found it really helpful in getting my files ready to be cut.

My group tested the parameters on the laser cutter and did several passes to fine-tune full cuts and scoring. We also took the opportunity to test dimensions for the notch width, and we ended up being the most pleased with the grip on a 3.6mm wide notch on this cardboard.

Here are a few of the constructions I built with the press fit kit. It wasn't as flexible in the ways that it could connect together as I had hoped, but rethinking the positions of the slots would give it more possibilities.