Welcome to Week 1
WEEK 1 (Laser Cutting)
This week I decided to make a juggling club out of laser cut cardboard! I am an avid juggler (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KtsIzZct8OM) and want ot make something cool here.
Typical juggling club:
As can be seen, the clubs are long, narrow objects. It would be possible to make them out of cardboard, or another material, and assemble the parts together.
My plan is that the cylindrical nature of the club can be decomposed into 4 - 6 individual strips, connected together with a ring. Finally the top piece contains 6 holes and joins onto the club top.
Past iterations, as I discovered after coming up with the idea, can be found here: http://historicaljugglingprops.com/innovative-and-rare-juggling-clubs-1970-to-present/ do command+f “laser cut”
My parametric design looks like the following on fusion.
I've included the relevant dxf file, which I achieved by converting the sketch, below.
Download DXF File
Download DXF File
And here's the svg version embedded:
I lasercut the pieces, selecting cardboard as my material and specifiying the thickness. I made sure to focus the laser cutter before cutting.
The prototyped version is shown below.
While the club was able to be assembled, the fit was unusually tight. This was because I didn't account properly for the width of cardboard. Furthermore, I was unable to install the bottom rings, which would have been nice, albeit not essential to perfromance.
Adapting the ring diameter led to the club being too loose, however, as cardboard isn't that rigid of a material. Specifically, I measured that each piece was about 4 mm thickness, and formed a hexagon at the center, as per the following diagram. Accounting for a kerf of 0.11 mm, this would mean I need to shorten the piece by 3.89 mm, or expand the hexagon's diameter by 7.88 mm (or 3.89 on radius).
Due to time limitations I wasn't able to make any additional iterations past the second and get it working. Regardless, I'm happy that I was able to assemble a functional club out of cardboard.
VINYL CUTTING:
I'm co-president of the MIT Student Juggling Club. I decided to use our logo as the basis for the sticker.
I opened the logo up in illustrator. Most of the letters were the necessary color black for svg creation, so I simply had to outline the ball + club, and then convert the file to an svg.
The Adobe file is shown here and attached below.
≈ Download adobe file for vinyl cut
I then converted it to an svg, uploaded it to the machines mods software, and started printing.
Initially I used force = 100 g / m2. Unfortunately this was too low to sufficiently separate the letters from the surrounding plastic frame.
I increased the force to 120 and this worked.
The letters were then transferred over to release paper, and carefully removed.
After which they we installed on my laptop!
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