Week 11 - A Tough Cut

This week I focused entirely on the new laser cut prototype. As stated before, making the prototype out of cardstock proved to be ineffective as the material is far to flexible, making it almost impossible to assemble reliably by hand. To respond to this I bought a sample of 1/16 in thick cardboard as it is considerably more rigid and the thickness better represents the metal that will be used. The cardboard was too big for the laser cutter (30''x20'' in for the cardboard vs  24''x18'' for the cutter), so I had to cut it into two panels, the smaller measuring 20''x14.5''.

Throughout the weekend, I spent a lot remaking the design so that it would fit within the 20''x14.5'' in panels and so that the parts can come together in an "altering manner." At first, I made the design in inches, but I then realized that it would be more useful to keep it in millimeters, so I had to convert it that way. Looking over my reference documents, I realized that the thickness of the cardstock was very close to half the 3mm thickness of the metal that would be used (1/16'=1.59 mm) so I tweaked my design it to be half scale. I also experimented with the lengths of the parts so that I could cut a maximum number of parts from the cardstock panel and made sure so that it the ends of the finished product would go smoothly together. In addition, I tried making the design so that it would cut across all of the panel in one pass, but the large number of features slowed my computer dramatically and caused solidworks to crash multiple times, fortunately I realized that the main part of the pattern only took about 1/2 of the pannel, so I could leave it as is and just rotate the panel in the laser cutter.

Finally on Tuesday, I had to cut my new design and show my groupmates how the laser cutter works. Unfortunately, the designated computer was having technical difficulties such as extreme lag (taking a minimum of two seconds to respond to mouse clicks) and difficultly reading usb drives. Still, it eventually managed to work, so I opened DraftSight and uploaded the DXF file. Again, there were some more technical issues, such as the scale being wrong (the DXF file was set to inches) and the lasercutter not cutting all of the lines. Fortunately after some more trial and error with the settings and many passes with the laser cutter, I succesfully managed to cut out all of the parts, each with a set of duplicates. Going forward, I am going to help show the group how to assemble the part and discuss what else we should focus on for the rest of the semester.