The mechanical movement I chose for project 2 was #138, which was a weirdly shaped cam. I decided to work with this for my midterm project.
With this uneven up and down movement, I thought I could make it look like waves, so I decided to make a surfing beach design. After drawing around the original drawing and using some designs from the noun project (the sun and the waves), I modeled the scene like this:
I decided to have a surfboard sitting perpendicular to the board connected to the rod, and also have a piece behind that will connect to the rod from behind and then branch out to the slits where the waves are. A rod will stick through the slits and move a second layer of waves. Once this was finished, I made a low fidelity prototype with cardboard, the laser cutter, and pipe cleaners.
After it was assembled, it barely worked because the rod would get stuck on the cam and the rod would also wobble a lot. My silly self also kept trying to put the rod on the circular piece which would then get hit by the rod, and then I realized I could just put it on top of the cam itself. While this made me a little skeptical, I stuck with the design because other cams have been successful in previous semesters. Because the Epilogue laser cutter was having problems with catching on fire, I cut these pieces on the Glowforge. I cut a couple pieces in addition to the cam parts, but soon realized that the Glowforge scaled them down for some reason, so I didn’t have much use for these pieces other than early prototyping, and some for later decoration.
The next thing I did was make the rod and cam out of metal using the plasma cutter. The only thick piece of metal was this chunk of thrown away painted steel that looked really old and gross. To cut this, I had to use an angle grinder to grind away the paint on the places where the plasma cutter would start a cut. After I cut this, I used the angle grinder to clean up the pieces, then filed and sanded them to make them look presentable. 
I also rounded the point of the rod because it would make it slide smoother. Next, with some guidance from Dr. Wettergreen, I realized I had to fit a bearing into it for it to spin smoothly, so I got a used one from an old project and drilled a hole (in the machine shop) big enough to pressure fit the bearing. Near the end of the project, I drilled another hole at the edge to fit a handle for the user to spin it.
Next I designed the exact dimensions of the base on illustrator. I wanted a base piece that would have the board fit in it along with two support triangles. I then cut it (along with the decorative parts), but there were two problems. 1: the laser cutter was cutting at an angle so the board and the base were not perpendicular, and 2: I accidentally made the triangles too long because I didn’t account for the thickness of the board. I fixed both of these problems with a lot of sanding. I also didn’t cover the board with masking tape, so there were a lot of burn marks I had to sand off.
I next made the guide for the rod by 2d modeling one thick and two thin rectangles and wood gluing them together. The rod stuck out a little from it so I designed thin supports with an indent to hold it in. Some of my measurements were off, so again a lot of sanding was done to fix things. I also forgot to cut a hole in the back of it for the connector to the back piece, so I used a dremel to carve one out. I also used the dremel to sand down the excess wood glue.
Next, I laser cut the holes for the back connector in the board and engraved my name on the base. It didn’t completely line up in the end so even more sanding was done to fix this. I also forgot to account for the middle piece when making my waves, so I had to resize them.
I also stained these two pieces with a light liquid stain, which overall looked good but ended up sort of uneven and left a lot of white residue because the board was tilted when it was soaking. I also put a line of tape through the surfboard and stained the sides with dark stain, and also cut a fin for it. After this, I laser cut the back connector piece out of acrylic (which smells realllly bad) and epoxied the dowel connectors to it.
After this, I spray painted the waves, sun, and clouds. The yellow spray paint can was acting up, so the paint layer on it is unnecessarily thick.
When I tested the design, I was having a lot of trouble with it getting stuck but ended up fixing the problem with even more sanding, and a lot of Vaseline as a lubricant. After this, I wanted to cut the surfer, so I took one from the noun project then redesigned it to be suitable for the laser cutter, where some parts would be cut and some engraved.
I next laser cut this out of wood, which looked pretty good but I then tried laser cutting a thick black piece of acrylic because I thought it would look better. It melted a tiny bit in the laser cutter which messed up the thin edges. I then tried using a thinner clear piece which cut perfectly.
After this, I epoxied everything left together, and the final project ended up like this:
It’s hard to tell how long I spent working on this at the OEDK, but I’d probably estimate around 30 hours. If I paid myself $18 an hour that would be $540. There was a lot of trial and error. I probably used around $20 worth of plywood, $3 of wooden dowel and $7 of acrylic. In addition, I’ll add on another $8 for spray paint and stain. Lastly, it’s very hard to estimate how much that steel was worth because it was from a mystery scrap piece, so I’ll guess around $10. This altogether adds up to this mechanical model being worth ~ $588, but the knowledge I gained from it making it was priceless 🙂
