Week 3

This has been another interesting week for me. I learnt a lot .I learnt the two major machines here; laser cutter and the vinyl cutter. I learnt the general operations of thes machines and their various parts.Laser cutter is able to handle various compuer designed cuttings of differnt materials depending on the machine capacity. It can be so good for commercial productions since a single design can be reprinted as many as you need.For this class, this is the ideal machine for the assignment for the week.

The vynyl cutter is also another important machine in Fablab, it does cuttings for smaller circuits and screen printing stencils. The works faster with vynil and other materials of smaller thickness

The week's Assignment therefore is do Computer Controlled Cutting for a Parametric Press-fit Construction Kit. After viewing other parametric press fits for former students' files Students Achive and other sites like for Epilog laser and Instructables, I came up with my design as below;

Plans

- Machine used: laser cutter

- Material used: Acrylic material with thickness of 6mm

This was done with Inkscape. Here, tools like like path nodes editor and Bezier for curves and straight lines was so helpful. Also used the Measurement tool, rectangle & square tools. The drawing wasnt good enough following the challenge with the tool for editing nodes on paths.
Even-though it provides an opportunity for the 3D image viewing, I still went ahead to try other software and this landed me to CorelDraw. This is a superb tool for the 2D designing like for the one I was doing.

Lessons learnt
I managed to manouver through the corel draw so comfortably. I perfected myself in usage of measurements. I can now handle most tools of corelDraw. I realised that I need more practice with other relevant programs and especially Inkscape which I have been regarding to be so easy to manipulate. In my initial stages of imaginating what to design, I hade to use small hard papers to cut them physically using a pair of scisors at home just to make sure that my imagination can be actualized and done practically. I guess that if I continue practicing the 3D programs, I will better do it next time but it was a great experience.

All in all, I finally decided to do a real project Angolo Specs. These are simplistic wooden spectacles ( Am avoiding using the name "Glasses" since all parts are made of wood. It provides a chance to customize your own specs to your taste and preference; laser cutting and pressfitting the parts.