Week 12 - Mechanical and Machine Design

Printing news on toilet paper roll

In Mechanical and Machine Design week, my whole section comes together to make one machine: the toiler paper news printer. Link to the whole Architecture section machine project. Here I log my contributions to the project which will also be on the project page.

Mechanical Team + Machine Stand Design

I would've loved to be on any part of the project because the class taught us skills to do anything :). But I did end up on the mechanical team. The main goal was to design a way to hold the whole machine in place. I had some ideas in the first place but I had to work with whatever the other mechanical parts were given to me (the linear and rotary parts and their connection). After a bit of brainstorming, I decided to go with a press fit design.

Features

• Every part can be CNC'ed and press fit together.
• The stand goes down fully on 3 sides to provide structural support.
• The inside compartment can be used to store more toilet paper.

I arranged a flat version for the assembly people to cut easier. All parts are parametric so can be adjusted based on the thickness of the material they end up choosing. Note some parts (from another mechanism) have holes on the side that will need to be drilled after CNCing.

Fabricated Stand!

The team ended up using plastic and waterjet because that was the easiest way but I'm happy with how it came out and how I was able to quickly design a simple stand given the constraints.