Wildcard
I did the Electrical Discharge Machining with TA Dave. We first cut a puzzle together, and then I did a customized MIT puzzle.
Group Piece
On Monday, we did a training at the shop on the ground floor of the media lab. It was the first time that I entered this shop, and also the first time seeing this kind of machine. From what I remember, Dave said this machine uses water to guide a skinny wire that runs through the top and bottom. Then this wire is powered, which was used to cut the piece.
More pictures during the training, Neil stopped by as well.
Then Dave showed us how to operate the machine, which was a really long & complicated process, I remember he said because this machine was made in Japan, the manual was translated from Japanese to English using machine translation, and it wasn't very readable. He showed us a piece (right pic) that he made, and it slid beautifully. But he also showed us the attempts he had (bottom pic), apparently, it took a LOT of attempts.
My Piece
I designed a MIT puzzle (well, not really "designed", basically modified the MIT logo a bit so that we can have male and female parts). Dave helped me update the files a bit (included filet etc.) and it was sent to the machine. He said we don't need to remember the steps so I just took a picture of the monitor.
The first bug we encountered was it didn't have enough water (because the whole thing should be submerged under the water. So we added some.
The second error we saw indicates that the piece was done. And we got the female piece.
However, we searched for the male piece for quite a while but couldn't find it anywhere. Dave said maybe the machine didn't even cut it. So we did it again with only the male piece in the file, and yeah, this time, it succeeded.
Claire showed me how Dave showed her how to sand and make those two pieces fit each other. Basically, we need to first polish the outside surface and then put oil in the inside piece. Nudge back and forth using a small clamp until it can slide perfectly.
I spent a really long time polishing and nudging, but it still doesn't slide very well (although it did fit very well). I will nudge more after I'm done with the final project and have more time.
