The midterm deadline has finally arrived!  Our assignment for our midterm projects was to select a woodworking project out of Building Wooden Machines or Making Mechanical Marvels in Wood and recreate it using the tools and techniques we’ve learned so far this semester.  I chose to do the same project that I made 2D sketches for earlier in the year.  Here it is again as a reference:

The first thing I did was go back to my Illustrator file and make sure all of my sketches were correctly sized.  The pieces that were to go in the middle of the wheel especially were especially crucial to cut as accurately as possible.  I quickly found out that I could actually delete more than half of the 2D drawings I had since they corresponded to dowels and spheres, which I would not be able to laser cut.  In order to make the three dimensional machine in the picture above, all I had to do was cut out multiple identical disks and stack them on top of each other. So finalizing the Illustrator file was easy work and didn’t take long.  On to laser cutting!  Unfortunately, when I went to cut out my pieces the laser cutter was not working.  Everything worked fine with the cutter and with the computer/Engrave Lab, up until the point where I pressed the “Test” button on the laser cutter.  For some reason it would just freeze then, which was concerning.  I found Carlos and asked him about it, and after troubleshooting with him for a short while Carlos had to send an email to the vendor asking for help.  I thought I was pretty out of luck, but it actually turned into a really cool learning experience when Carlos said I could use the SEA laser cutter instead! The SEA cutter works a lot like the OEDK cutter, but with some slight differences.  It was fun to be able to use the SEA cutter since I probably won’t ever get the chance to do so again.  I even took a picture because it was so much fun!

The main limitation of the SEA cutter as opposed to the OEDK cutter is its size.  You can fit much bigger sheets of wood/acrylic in the OEDK machine. I figured I wasn’t going to get all of my dimensions down exactly right on the first try, so I used some low quality wood for this first set of cuts.  Once I had all of my pieces I went about testing the parts that I thought had the highest chance of messing up (the middle part of the wheel).  After putting the pieces together with a few dowels – which I got from cutting down dowels that were lying around the OEDK – I saw that I had accidentally overlooked a critical aspect of the design.  The two small wheels on the bottom of the middle rotating system were supposed to roll along the inner wall of the big overall wheel, but when I created the Illustrator files I didn’t make the radius of each of those circles match properly.  So, back to the drawing board I went (almost literally), and after messing with Illustrator for a little while more I cut out some more pieces.  I sized the parts so that the bottom wall of the big wheel would meet the two small wheels, like they were supposed to, but for the rest of the big overall wheel I made the radius slightly larger so that it would be more obvious to a user or observer what the function of the machine is. It took me a couple of iterations to get all the sizes correct, but in the end I figured it all out!

Finally, I thought I was getting close to finishing.  According to my Illustrator file and all the calculations I did, all of my parts should have fit together perfectly.  Unfortunately that was not quite the case yet.  The two small rotating wheels fit too tightly to the wall and it was difficult to rotate them at all because of that.  Rather than cutting two new circles out with the laser cutter, I tried to just sand down the edges of the ones I had.  I used a dremel with sandpaper on the end of it to speed up the process, but it still took a considerable amount of time.  One of the immediate things I notices about sanding the edges of the wood was that they became a lighter, more natural looking wood shape.  This was because I was taking off all of the blackened wood that was burnt by the laser when it was cut.  I liked the way the lighter wood looked and decided to make parts of my final design look that way too.  It took a long time to sand all of the wood to an even-looking color, but it was definitely worth it in the end.  Sanding it that much also made it very smooth to the touch, which was an added bonus! The two rotating wheels eventually got to a manageable size, and I even put some animal lard on them to lubricate them as they rolled.  I glued all of the parts of my project together with wood glue, and after everything dried I used the drill press to drill holes through each of the layers and connected them with dowels.  Also, the wood order had finally come in! That means wood balls!  I used the drill press again to drill holes in some wood balls and used them to decorate my project some more.  Here is how it all turned out!

The large ball also serves as the handle for the user to rotate the system.  I really enjoyed working on this project!! Even though it meant spending many many hours in the OEDK, it was definitely enjoyable work.