MACHINE WEEK

One week of mayhem!

This week, we worked as a group to build a machine. "Machine mayhem" is a great descriptor for this assignment, since it's a shocking amount of work to get done in 6-ish days. On this page, I only talk about what I worked on, which was only the mechanical side of machine-building. For the entire story, please go check out our group page!
This week, there was a lot of group documentation. I have done my best to credit photos / videos properly; any unlabeled media is mine.

Day 1: Brainstorming and agreeing on an idea.

Wednesday, 11/22/19

After class on Wednesday, we (the CBA section) got together and tossed some ideas around. There were a lot of food-themed ideas, as well as some others like a piano-playing machine or a tattoo (henna) machine. We decided on making an apple lathe, which would be able to use a toolpath to cut an apple into a specific shape, then spiral it into a slinky.

Day 2: Going to recitation, splitting into groups, and starting to build.

Thursday, 11/21/19

After a really informative recitation about Squidworks (thanks Jake!), we met again to split into groups. I decided to join the mechanical team because I wanted to get some hands-on experience, was curious about the whole "design-make-assemble" workflow, and was concerned about being able to contribute meaningfully in the other groups (since they involve lots of coding or electronics work, both of which I've proven myself to be quite bad at).
After the meeting, I went down to the CBA lab with D, Jack, and Alfonso, where we discussed mechanisms for actually spinning the apple. Alfonso showed us a super cool rotary axis design from Jake, so we decided to design our axis off of that.

After re-designing the rotary axis, Jack and I set out to find nails. We wanted nails and not screws because these would be stabbing into the apple, and we worried that any threads would destroy the flesh of the apple. Of all the steps of the night, we didn't expect that finding nails would be the rate-limiting step, but it took us an inordinate amount of time, and three different lab spaces (CBA lab, CBA shop, and Tangible Media Lab) to find three nails.

After finding nails and measuring their diameters, we put the measurements into the design (which was, conveniently, parametric) and printed it on one of the Prusas.

Day 3: Prototyping the machine

Friday, 11/22/19

The night before, we'd decided to make a prototype of the machine out of laser cut cardboard, to see if things fit together and to find out if there were any fatal design errors. D helpfully did this in the morning, and by the time I got to the shop in the afternoon (after my Wellesley classes), the gang had decided to move on to a more substantial material, plywood. The plywood, helpfully, was the same thickness as the acrylic that we'd eventually be using, so it was a good way to test clearances and to get a sturdy model that could be looked at and passed around at the team meeting. D and I cut pieces on the epilog and the GCC laser cutters, and Chucho helped manually cut out a stubborn piece (that didn't cut through) on the band saw. During this time, I'd started a few Prusa prints of the joints that would hold the pieces together. Unfortunately, I had a pretty low success rate with this- many of my prints kept failing. I eventually ended up with some usable pieces, but not as many as I'd needed or hoped to have. Luckily, I had enough to secure the important parts of the prototype, and we were able to hold the rest together using some painter's tape.

Day 4: Switching to acrylic, building the passive end

Saturday, 11/23/19

I didn't actually work on the project today, since I had a number of things to do back at Wellesley. The rest of the group got a lot of stuff done today- to my understanding, plywood started getting replaced with acrylic, and the passive stabilizer part (to hold the apple from the other side) came together.