Group assignment As a team, Po Hao, Aarti, Emma an I started characterizing the parameters of the laser cutter. I found the Laser quite easy to handle, I had used one before but it was always through an intermediary that moved all of the parameters. Focus turned out to be really important because if you don’t focus it correctly it is possible the laser beam wont go all the way through the cardboard or piece you are using. The three parameters: power, speed and rate can change your design a lot, specially while rastering an image. We did a raster image and played a little bit with speed, it turned out it went through but didn’t burned all the way in order to see it clearly, eventually we got a really nice design that is visible with indirect light and not visible with direct light.

While doing the joint clearance experiments we discovered the machine is quite exact and as the cardboard tends to expand or vary its thickness it is better to leave a margin of at least 0.2mm in order to fit properly.

Individual assignment: I had some trouble with the vinyl cutter because of my file, everything else is quite easy to do, the sizing of the document, the parameters etc.

Turned out my document had a lot of lines because I vectorized a .jpeg file so the machine was going crazy with it, I did different tests, some better than others but they where no good because of the amount of small and repeated lines I had in my document. I decided to try another document and it turned out really fine. I did a decal on my computer, it was challenging because of the amount of corners it has but I was able to do it after 35 minutes of peeling.

Press fit kit

I started working with Freecad but felt the interface was not so friendly, I got a little bit impatient with it and decided to use AutoCAD, I did my pieces in a relatively short amount of time but later discovered the really nice properties freecad has for parametric design. While working with AutoCAD I assumed the thickness of the cardboard was 6mm so I designed all of my pieces with a 6mm slot, turns out the cardboard is 4mm so I had to change the scale of my document directly in CorelDraw. This was not that hard but if I had used a parametric design tool this change would have been really easy to make, I returned to FreeCAD and realized how easy and fast is to work with the worksheet. I will incorporate this in my next designs for the laser cutter.

Design:

I tried different things with the press fit kit, first I really liked how the triangular shape gave a lot of possibilities for shapes and assemblages depending on the position of the slot so I did a bunch of them, I ended up creating a base for the plant I have in my studio. I wasn’t convinced with what I had so I decided to make a sort of game with this idea of assembly and disassembly.

I took a reading and some notes from my Colloquium class and assembled key words in the pieces to be assembled. These words change meaning every time they are paired with other words, in this way as you are constructing a structure you are also changing the meaning of words and representation of them. Just like writing or thinking.