So, where to begin…. Well, I chose to do the squirrel fan because of the straightforward geometries and the sleek and elegant look of the piece. First I used the woodworking book that Dr. Wettergreen provided to see how they approached the project. The person in the book had different sizes of wood available to him and so his strategy totally differed from mine. However, the approach was to use Adobe Illustrator and draw the geometries. The most complex ones were the back and bottom of the squirrel fan. The goal was to match geometries to give it a smooth overlap. The holes also had to match and so I did that by overlapping two geometries of interest and then grouping the holes with their respective parts. The sizes of these holes were done through much trial and error because the tolerances for the dowels varied. Now the laser cutting. Again, it was a trial and error process, especially at first. I noticed that the laser was cutting twice and I later found out the reason. When I overlapped them and joined that geometries in adobe pathfinder, there were overlapping lines that had to be deleted. After adjusting for this mistake and finding the right power and speed settings, I was able to cut my material. One finished I was able to sand and overlap my first two big pieces with complex geometries like so:

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The tolerancing was tight because I needed this structure to be stable. Then came the handle and the fan. Initially, the fan was supposed to have 12 different blades but due to the thickness of wood available that had to be changed to 6. Then I proceeded to glue the structures that didn’t need to be moving together. I also loosened the tolerances on the axis of rotation that mattered (handle and fan). This would allow for a smoother rotation. Or so I thought. The downside to loosening the tolerance is that I was using a rubber band for the pulley that would initiate the rotational movement. As a result, the rubber band would pull on the fan and the handle and would cause a slightly unbalanced rotational movement. This had to be mitigated with stabilizers. Initially there would be two. One as shown and one on the right side of the piece. However, the thickness of the fan blades allowed for there to be only one stabilizer. Putting the bars beneath it would have negatively affected the rotation because of the friction. As a result, the front stabilizer was used and also I employed a back stabilizer. This was done through many iterations of finding the best tolerances for the stabilizer and finding the rubber band with the right elasticity. Then I proceeded to  use 240 grit sandpaper and use lindseed oil on certain parts of my piece to give it a clean finished look and a lot of contrast. The drill was also used to help loosen up the tolerances for the dowels to fit into the holes.         Finally with all the iterations and figuring the optimal smoothness for the turning of the pulley, the end product is: The extra wood glue had to be used to insure that the front heavy piece would not fall over. I will sand the remainder of the piece down to not have glue marks. Overall, this project made me realize how detailed woodworking actually is. But it gave me motivation and drive to want to achieve something that I never had much experience doing.