figure 1. the original picture

figure 2. the "final" product 

figure 3. s-shaped hooks and disk

figure 4. movie of my wind chime (without the chime)

WEEK 3

This week, our assignment was to use the waterjet cutter to make "Anything".  We could receive extra credit by using two different materials.  Considering my experience last week, I decided I better come up with something that I was really excited about doing so I wouldn't matter as much if things took me longer than I planned. 

Since I've been dancing for about 13 years now, I wanted to make something related to dance that could move.  I found a beautiful picture of a ballerina (figure 1.), used CorelTrace, CorelDraw, Adobe Illustrator, and some other programs to get rid of as many jagged edges as possible, and imported her into OMAX layout. After some fumbling around in OMAX (and some help from Patrik, John and Thom), I got it to a point where I could cut it out.  I liked her so much that I made two.

At first I wanted to place her on a glass base, but I decided to go with acrylic to get to use the laser cutter again. Sitting in the base is a small "T" which holds the two ballerinas together and has a point at the bottom. At the bottom of the base, I used a small dremel to make a small crevice for the "T"  stand. 

The more I looked at my ballerina, the more I didn't like the movement or the stand.  After reconsidering what I would do for my final project, I decided to go with a wind chime of sorts. I took the ballerinas out of the stand and made two s-shaped hooks and a disk (figure 3.). I connected the ballerinas together using an acrylic bar I cut in the laser cutter and hung them on the hooks. The final version of my project is in figure 4 which is also a movie. You can also see it down the hall in my office 120g.