The midterm for ENGI 210 is a force to be reckoned with, and a task to be paced. My immediate major take-away from this project is how thankful I am that I never slept in the OEDK, better yet, still got full nights of sleep throughout. Not to negate the 20+ hours I spent on this project, but a small clap on the back for pacing!

Work Day 1 (Time Estimate: 1.5 hours)

Like most projects, this project started on Illustrator. With drawings due the same day as a plasma cut piece, I was already overwhelmed. I quickly conceptualized an idea around the hand-drawn gears I created for the 2d drawing project. What if I covered one gear with an etched world, and had something traveling around the world? That would be neat, huh? I drew out the base and the mechanism for testing. My experience using Illustrator earlier in the semester proved fruitful: I was using new tools like the scissors tool, shape maker, and keyboard shortcuts.

Work Day 2 (Time Estimate: 1.5 hours)

My next step was to create a low-fidelity prototype. At this point, I needed to learn to laser cut! Adulfo kindly taught me during class, and I was ready to rumble. I began to cut out my pieces using cardboard:

With all of my pieces cut, I recruited my (now) buddy (thanks, ENGI 210!) Nick to help me learn to cut a dowel, a necessary component of my project’s assembly.

Nick was an excellent teacher (per usual), and he taught me two different ways to cut a dowel. The first is to just hack at it with this tiny saw thing, and the other is to use this massive machine (that he demo’d on the right). I was pretty afraid of the machine to cut such small dowels (around two inch cuts), so I kept with the hacking strategy.

Work Day 3 (Time Estimate: 1.5 hours)

Using hot glue, I then assembled my low fidelity prototype. It worked! However, one of the notches on my gear broke in the process. KJ witnessed the whole thing (how embarrassing!) and advised I put it back together with tape. The dude is a GENIUS. Thank you, KJ!

With the low-fidelity prototype up-and-running, I could extract my “learnings.” The big takeaway was that I needed to reduce the space between my two gears and make the slot where they backboard meets the base smaller for a tighter press fit.

I made the alterations to my illustrator file:

Work Day 4 (Time Estimate: 2.5 hours)

Work day 4 was an Illustrator day again! Although my mechanism was updated, I wasn’t feeling good about this whole earth idea. Too overdone. So many space projects at the OEDK already. What else is round and has things flying around it? I gave “round things” a google and settled on a dart board! Perfect! I spent this time flushing out the dart-themed details on illustrator. This included making the board, physical darts, and the dart-patterned etch on my backboard and base. Tedious Illustrator work (think many many shapes being made, copied, rotated, etc.), but I think it was worth it for the decorative effect.

Work Day 5: (Time Estimate: 3 hours)

High fidelity materials day!! Today is the day I got my very own piece of wood:

But I really spent most of this day plasma cutting. With my design in hand, I went to plasma cut and encountered the same problems that I did last time: my design was not filling in correctly on the plasma cutting software. Same old story: back and forth from the computer lab to the plasma cutter. But! This time I knew that there was an easy solution: bring every iteration of my file into the plasma cutting room (stroke, no fill; fill, no stroke; both fill and stroke; etc.) and see if one of them works. One of them did, and I prepared my cut. I went to grab a sheet of metal and was disappointed that none of the pieces were as thick as my wood. A little scary given that the plasma cut piece would need to interact as a gear, but I grabbed the thickest piece and got my cut on the very first try.

I used 40 grit sandpaper and a file to take a first go at the dross.

Dr. Wettergreen advised that I wouldn’t be able to get that center hole perfect enough by hand filing to fit well around a dowel, so I knew I had a drill press project to come in the following work day.

Work Day 6 (Time Estimate: 4 Hours)

Laser cutting day! Time to test if my design could actually work in high-fidelity materials. I got my illustrator file all set up, and went to cut. Oops! I forgot to save my jog settings.

Luckily it was just my test cut, and I still learned from it! It cut the wood, just not where I wanted it. I was ready to cut! I double checked my settings…

and weighed down my slightly curved wood at the advice of my buddy Nick…

and I cut! A glorious successful cut with beautiful etching. it was all perfect except…

one line that was supposed to cut actually etched. I learned that I needed to keep my wood in place, don’t touch a thing, and delete every other part of my illustrator file before I cut this. It worked! I had a fresh, successful set of cut wood pieces.

Now for that drill press exercise…

Nick helped me out, and we got creative in our clamping. We found the correct bit no problem, and he walked me through the drill press. No biggie – success!

Using all of my new pieces, I press fit assembled my piece. Lookin’ good!

At this point in the project, I got feedback that my piece might not stand up. I consulted my two favorite engineers for their advice:

Given that I had already etched my base and backboard, I was reluctant to cut holes in them and run the long laser cut again. Instead, I decided to layer my base pieces to make the backboard stand up straighter. Thanks, guys!

Day 7 (Time Estimate: 5 hours)

Day 7 was lots of moving parts.

My first step on Day 7 was to make my metal piece soft to the touch. This included angle grinding, sanding with Joe in the machine shop, and sandblasting it. When the part was soft, I then spray painted it and painted on decorative acrylic details.

I then stained my pieces

and coated them with polyeurethane.

I coated the metal piece with an acrylic topcoat.

Next I spray painted my accents, but shoot! We ran out of orange spray paint. I decided to keep to theme and use orange acrylic paint instead on half of my accent pieces.

I coated the orange pieces with acrylic coating too to compensate for the matte finish of the paint.

I then embarked on creating the right size hole for my stacked base. I essentially laser cut rows and rows if different holes to test with my backboard piece. It took many, many tries to figure out, but ultimately I know I got the right fit!

I then cut my new bases

And clamped them with wood glue to my old base to dry overnight.

Day 8 (Time Estimate: 4 hours)

Unfortunately the wood glue and hole cut wasn’t entirely perfect, so I needed to take a file in the hole to make the piece fit. But it worked! And it fits tightly! I use wood glue to secure the backboard and add some sandpaper wedges to the front so it stands upright as it dries.

I proceed to have a rapid finishing party. This includes, adding protective coats to my paint on everything, staining some small decorative dowels, screwing small dowel holes in my darts to attach them to the base, drilling holes in the base, and last minute staining clean ups. A lot of steps at once here, but they really all happened side by side. Luckily no major hiccups.

staining dowels:

protective coats of paint:

drilling holes:

Day 9 (Time Estimate: 3 hours)

Day 9 was about watching it all come together.

The day was mostly superglueing the remaining parts, last-minute dremel-ing to the metal piece (so the mechanism actually works when assembled), and trying to keep track of it all!

Here’s me making the metal piece work:

Luckily the dremel worked wonders, and Adulfo helped me figure out that I should add that extra wood piece on the tip of the metal piece so it would catch the wood gear every. single. time. (shoutout to not having thick metal in the machine shop!).

Finally, I could assemble the whole thing:

I’m so proud of it! Here are some detail shots:

And a final awkward bonus photo of me trying to get the superglue off my hands by soaking them in lemon juice (FYI – it doesn’t work).

 

Cost Estimate

This is definitely going to be scary.

26 hours of time (at $20 an hour) = $520

Adobe Illustrator: Illustrator is only available as a subscription, which has a minimum time and cost of $20/month = $20

Material Cost (Metal): $8.64 for a sheet at BuyMetal.com. I’d say I used no more than a quarter of a sheet, so my cost was $2.16 because somebody else can use the rest = $2.16

Material Cost (Wood): $5/sheet, one sheet = $5

Material Cost (Dowels) $13.50 for a variety pack on Amazon = $13.50

Material Cost (cardboard) $9.99 for big sheets on Amazon = $9.99

1 hr on the Plasma Cutter: Sunbelt rentals offers Plasma Cutter rental for $71/Day = $71

Laser Cutter: hard to get an exact rental price without submitting a design-specific quote, but I could do this at TX/RX with a monthly membership of $50 = $50

Angle Grinder: Home Depot rents an Angle Grinder for $26/4 hours. This is their minimum time, so I’m stuck with the $26 = $26

50 grit sandpaper: the sandpaper is $5.61 on Amazon = $5.61

Dremel: $30 on Amazon

Acrylic Paint: $5.91 on Amazon

file + smaller file: I found a good pack of these on Amazon! $12.99 for a pack with both = $12.99

sandblaster: Aztec rentals offers a sandblaster at $250 a day. This one really hurts given that I was only there for twenty minutes… $250

spray painting: The spray paint is $3.97 on Amazon, and I used four different bottles = $15.88

Drill Press: $76 on Home Depot

Dowel Saw: $15.99 on Amazon

Wood glue: $2.99 on Amazon

Gel Superglue: $2.43 on Amazon

Wood Stain: $9.76 on Amazon

Polyurethane: $9.99 on Amazon

Masking tape: $3.61 on Amazon

Total Cost: $1,158.81

Yikes! Thank you, as always, OEDK, and to the many people that helped me!