Kate Hollenbach / MAS.863 How to Make (almost) Anything

I wasn't sure what to make this week. Although I've finally started to narrow down my final project into something do-able in the next couple weeks, and I am going to need to make a large table for it, I wasn't ready prototype anything yet. When Yannick told me that he was thinking about milling out a maze, I immediately thought of the game labyrinth, where the player uses knobs on a box to control the tilt of a marble in a maze. I convinced Yannick that if he designed a maze, I'd try to make a box for it to make it into the labyrinth game.

We weren't sure how the game worked on the inside, but luckily my friend Laura Martini did, and explained it to us (thank you)!

Yannick designed the maze in Photoshop, which we then imported into cad.py to create the toolpaths for the Shopbot.

I designed the box using cad.py, which we had to export to PNG because the parts were so large they caused an out of memory error if cad tried to render them at a resolution larger than 200dpi. Once exported to PNG, we used Corel Draw to vectorize the image and export the result to DXF, which we could then import with the Shopbot software.

The larger parts make the outside of the box, while the smaller, narrower parts create a square frame that can be used to tilt the maze. This frame is attached loosely to the maze with two screws, so that the maze can also rotate.

Once we machined the parts and put together the box (which required a LOT of sanding!), we fashioned a mechanism for tilting the box.

The tilting mechanism isn't perfect, but turning the knobs does tilt the maze, even if a little inconsistently.

be careful making big things in cad. the box I designed resided in a rectangle that was 19" x 30", and cad couldn't render it at 300dpi ( recall that 500dpi is the recommended precision for the Shopbot).

if you import shapes into the Shopbot software (say, from a DXF file), ALWAYS say yes when it asks you if you want to center the part.

if you're making press-fit furniture out of wood, be prepared to do a lot of sanding.