Week 10
Make Something Big
I'm really excited about my project this week. I decided I wanted to continue on my theme of bananas and make a banana shaped rocking chair. I took some inspiration from a previous htmaa project. I designed it to look like a banana and came up with a structure that would support the OSB so it could withstand human weight.
played around with fusion animation to show how it assembles from flat pieces
I first made it in cardboard to see how it would come together and I was reasonably happy with how sturdy it felt.
Then came fabricating the big version. I learned that small changes can have a big impact on how long your job takes on the CNC router. Since I made the connection finger things pretty small, I had to cut a ton of dog bones and a lot of slots. This was very time consuming. I am very grateful to Anthony for letting me take 2 hours with the CNC router to cut it all.
cam for cutting out first 4x4 sheet
EDS doesn't have a vacuum held pcb router so we had to hold it down with plastic nails and hold the pieces together with tabs. Since I had a decent number of pieces, that meant I had a lot of tabs to remove. I removed some with an oscillating saw and then used the band saw to remove the rest. Luckily a lot of them were on straight edges so the band saw worked well.
Then came putting the pieces together. My pieces were designed to fit very snuggly together so assembly took some work. I use a rasp on the joints to add a bit of a chamfer so they would slide in better. Then I used a mallet to whack them together. Again, there were many pieces so this took a while.
part way through assembling.
Because it took so much effort to get the pieces together, that means they hold together really well, so I didn't need glue.
Then there was one more thing I wanted to add. In my opinion OSB is kinda ugly, plus I wanted my banana to be yellow, so I found a $20 yellow rug on amazon to cover it with. I cut it up, and staple gunned it onto my chair. The rug had some padding which made it really comfortable. Unfortunately, cutting up the rug made it shed a bit, but hopefully that will go away with time. I'm really proud of how it turned out!
