I did the safety training and saw how the machine works. It's a pretty nice, big CNC milling machine, and I'm glad to know that EDS (and Anthony especially) takes many safety precautions for milling things.
I set out to make a simple stool this week. Why? I knew I didn't have much time, so a simple design would do. Also, I would want to augment this thing later (perhaps during the molding and casting week or maybe after this semester) to decorate it; this inspiration comes from some of my friends who are buying furniture (one wanted to buy a stool that looks like corn, but it was too expensive, so I might do that for her).
I started by doing a bit of math to figure out what would be both "meter scale" (I interpreted this as using at least one square meter of material) and be an appropriate size for a stool. After giving myself some size ranges and doing a bit of algebra, I decided to make the stool's seat diameter 18" and base everything else of of that parametrically (I didn't want to fat or too skinny of a stool either, so I had the height of the stool and the width of the middle section based on that diameter).
Then I created the parts and later assembled them in software. I used Solidworks and decided to make a base part (for the top and bottom of the stool) and a side part (for the middle section); my stool was shaped like a spool or dumbbell. In case I wanted to make a corn stool, I made 10 flat sides of the stool (for a row of corn). The only adjustment I had to make was, since I saw in the assembly that the side parts intersected with one another, adjusting the width of the sideparts (I had orginally miscalculated this) by about 1/4 inch.
Then it was time to do the milling. Anthony helped me dogbone and add tabs to my parts in Fusion before generating GCode and helping me mill the parts. I just chose to mill OSB provided by the class; this creation was not fancy enough for a splurge on wood.
After milling, I sanded down all the tabs with a rasp, then sanded down all the surfaces of each piece with the auomatic sander. Concerned about the joints being too tight after a first test, I sanded down the connection tabs more. Unfortunately, though, I got carried away with it such that the pieces no longer naturally held together, and after EDS closed, I walked back to my dorm and had to glue the tabs in place (darn, no extra credit).
At the very least, I have a somewhat-too-tall, clunky-yet-still-put-together stool now!