Hi everybody, its been a little while. Over the past few weeks we’ve been working on our midterm project, which consists of a working creative rendition of one of the mechanical movements from 507 movements. We divided into teams, but for the most part we worked by ourselves to finish the project.

Starting Out

Since I had already made a 2D drawing of movement 354, I decided to move forward with it since it looked awesome, and it meant that I didn’t have to make another movement in Illustrator. Yay laziness. So I essentially started this project where I left off on the previous blog post.

But seeing as Adobe Illustrator sucks when you want to make a 3D object that actually fits together well, the first thing I had to do was transfer everything into Solidworks which is a bit of a pain. Since its usually easier to just make everything again from scratch, the only thing I actually transferred over was the infinity slot, since it would have been next to impossible to recreate that perfectly using splines in Solidworks.

The Calm Before the Storm 

After completing that model in solidworks, I wanted to make sure that this idea was even feasible so I decided to make a laser cut medium fidelity prototype just to check if the thing even worked. So I cut out a little base, the infinity rail, and a wheel with a peg and threw it all together. And what do you know, it worked! Here I learned the lesson of having the infinity sign lined up perfectly, a piece of knowledge that didn’t stick with me that long.. But i’ll touch on that later.

 

The SolidWorks Grind

Now that I had a working prototype, it was time to start designing my final prototype. For this, I knew that I wanted the device to be vertically oriented since it would have looked lame just laying on the table like my first iteration prototype. First, after having it pounded into my head in ENGI 120, I needed to brainstorm for how this device would work and what it would look like. The first major challenge I face was how to turn it. Since the wheel that turns needed to both be supported by some sort of stand, and needed the front face completely flat except for the peg, I had to figure out a way to have the user turn it. I went through a couple of different ideas but finally settled on just fixing the wheel to the axle, have the axle extend through the stand, and then attach a crank to spin it. Thus the user would just be spinning the wheel from behind the device.

Now that I had that figured out, the rest of the design was relatively straight forward, I had the infinity and the wheel from the first prototype, so I could just throw those in quickly, and then I just started to make everything. I started first with the stand, then supports for the stand, then the crank, then the rod supports, and it just kept going. Finally, after a few hours I had a final design that I was happy with.

Ignoring All of my Other Responsibilities to Build This Thing

Thus began the marathon that was putting this device together and getting it working. You have no idea how long it took to put this together… I think I broke my record for the amount of time spent at the OEDK in a week, which is saying something because I basically lived here last year.

To start out, I decided I would tackle what was to be the hardest part of my project, making the infinity guide out of aluminum. I found some 1/8 inch aluminum in the machine shop and I cut out my part, but that was just the beginning. I cleaned them up using a mix of belt sander, circular grinder, wire brush, and then the buffer. After all of this, they looked pretty nice, but they still needed some work, so I decided to sand blast them and give them a nice finish. Behold the fruits of my labor.

Next, I laser cut everything out, which took all of about 20 min. After this I began destroying my pieces, and my hands, with sand paper.

After everything was nice and smooth, I began to stain everything to make it look dope af. I went with a natural finish with butcher block oil on most surfaces but opted for a darker stain on the wheel and rail supports to both contrast with the wood and to make the infinity guide pop a little better.

Taking L’s

After gluing the two parts of my stand together I was ready to hammer everything together and glue it down. But then tragedy struck. I’m talking about Jon Snow dying level of tragedies here. When I was hammering everything down, I had to somehow hammer the angled stand supports into their slots but in doing so, I shattered one of the “truss” supports it had.

By now, I was in too deep. I knew that if I tried to pull the entire stand back out of the base, the entire thing would probably shatter. So I decided to roll with the punches and jerry rig a small strut to sit in that spot. So I made a small strut, laser cut it out, and glued it on to bring the support back to its formal level of glory.

Then about 5 minutes later, being the accident prone failure that I am, I stabbed myself with an exacto knife resulting in some blood spillage and a few expletives echoing throughout the OEDK.

Deliriousness Begins to Set In

Since I like being extra, I decided to lathe the peg that would travel through the infinity guide so that it would fit perfectly into the main wheel of my device and the infinity guide. I have to say that it came out beautifully.

Finally, I was ready to put everything together to see if the device actually worked! I glued the infinity guide to acrylic to keep it lined up, glued on the beam that would guide it, and put everything on the stand. Aannnnnddd.. IT DIDN’T WORK. This piece of shit was due in 12 hours and it wouldn’t turn because the infinity was too far away from the main ring. I had designed it to have some space there in order to limit friction between the infinity guide and the main wheel, but the infinity would flex too much, causing the peg to not catch. In addition, I had glued the infinity inaccurately, resulting in some spots being too small for the peg to fit through. Throwback to when I said alignment of the infinity is super important.

I kicked into overdrive to finish this damn thing. I had a test and a problem set due the next day, but screw it, I needed this thing to work, at least spin. So I threw another washer in between the wheel and the stand, pushing the wheel into the infinity guide, and ground down the peg as well as I could, because it was after hours and I couldn’t hop on a lathe. Finally, I put everything back together, and IT WORKED. At least a little bit. I was done. I had run the race, and finished, albeit limping across the finish line.

Relief and Sleep

I proudly walked over the 210 table and set down my piece. So this is what it feels like to be a father? While the entire device could have been made smoother through much more tinkering and designing, I had reached my effort limit and ended here. Shoutout to Serena for keeping me calm through all the craziness and coffee for keeping me semi awake.

See ya on the flippidy flip.