Documentation
Group Assignment
We all gathered on a friday afternoon and got the shop tour. There was a lot of talk about safety regarding
the Laser Cutter. This is due to the laser causing a lot of fires. Some of the safety precations were that
we are not able to walk away from a job and there are also mats that sense you are standing on them and if you
are not the job will stop. We were told we can maybe with deal with small fires but aren't required to
and that we should always call for help. Apart from that we also measured the kerf by cutting a piece and seeing
what the actual size should have been compared to what came out. We also decided to just mess with the power so as to
not create two changing variables. As the power was decreased it wouldn't cut through the cardboard but I am
sure if you decrease the speed enough it might. We continued up to 80 for power and although it started cutting at
46 it did have more of a burning element at the end although nothing burnt.
The Plan
At the beginning it was pretty difficult to think of something creative that could be made into a kit I really like architecture and thought it might be fun to be able to create famous buildings from the same building blocks. I decided to choose the big ben, the london bridge, and notre dame as the inspiration The buildings are "gothic revivial architecture" which means that they are mostly blocky and have a lot of little windows. Trying to duplicate this i am making square building blocks that can be arranged in similar shapes with windows cut into them I was hoping to put more decorations such as pillars and maybe something that moved with the living hinges
Making the CAD
the first step was to sketch up some cad to see the basic building blocks.
the point was to be able to build in every direction including upwards.
so i made joiners and cut cross like shapes at the top of the boxes to create a way to join in every direction.
I used the laser cutter in the Edgerton Center because I assumed the one in Architecture might be backed up.
The thing with this laser cutter and working with cardboard is that it cuts beautifully. I did not really have
to do any offsets to account for kerf because the cardboard squished and the laser was super precise.
there was still more i wanted to do but did not have time for including adding more of the decorations to make it look like
the london architecture which would have pronanly involved scoring and also making living hinges to make the tensions on the
bridge and also cut out more squares, they were pretty big and took a lot of material so maybe I should have
scaled them down. The final project came out really cute though once you use it too much the cardboard doesn't like
to really fit in the holes anymore which is something I might want to account for in the future.
