CNC Machining the Magnet Stool

This morning I (and Marc, one of the Fab Lab guys) CNC machined out the parts for my magnet stool in the Digital Fabrication lab here at U of M. It was great, I love the large budget of a huge research university! Lots of cool tech, and lots of it in the Fab Lab!

Being my first time on the machines it took a little bit to set up my file (only 5 hours!) because I had not quite optimized my Rhino file to be machined with MasterCam (the cnc software). But hey, it worked and it's awesome! I'll be sanding and glueing up tomorrow.

Drilling out some magnet holes.

That's the incredibly helpful Marc. Marc is awesome.

The finished cuts are quite nice, I'll be sanding them with some ridiculously super fine grit sand paper and just regular yellow legal paper (a tip from a friend who worked for Steelcase) for a super smooth and finished edges.

Thanks for reading!

Mobile Kitchen Concepts

In More w/ Less we're working on mobile kitchens as groups currently. They have to fit in a 2'x2'x5' space and cook a full meal. In the words of Jan Henrick (our prof), "I have to be able to cook a meal on them or you fail." So no pressure. Oh and we have 2.5 weeks to make a functioning prototype. Meaning a working kitchen in 2.5 weeks. Again, no pressure.

Our group is trying to make a kitchen that is minimal and portable as possible while still being a useable kitchen. It's exciting!

So far, we've filled up a few white boards and large pieces of paper with concepts and sketches.

Below is a few selected images from the concept meetings.

Working out what needs to be in a kitchen.

Drawing kitchen work spaces at full scale to get a stronger idea of scale and usable space.

Thanks for reading!

The Design Zorse

My professor Jan-Henrick came up with this in class last week to demonstrate how some people in the class were falling behind and simply not keeping up with work. Not pictured is the person trampled and bleeding and crying behind the zorse (half horse, half zebra).

A few of us are riding it and taking control, most of us are getting bounced around on the zorses hind legs, and the rest of us are getting dragged along, face in the zorses hind quarters.

And then they're the dead ones crying blood. Yep, Jan is crazy.

Ladies and Gentlemen, The Design Zorse!

"Your thinking, 'this guy is crazy'. Yes. I am." Jan-Henrick Anderson

Thanks for reading!

Week 4 and the Light Box in Smart Surfaces

Well, it's done.

Pretty much, we created a light box that is motion activated when someone walks by. Our group envisioned this project as an installation piece where there would be large scale deployment of these cubes in a large public area (like U of M's Diag). As people move between the cubes in their daily lives the light would follow them through the cubes. Yep, we made an art piece that makes the sun an ancillary part, it's got solar panels on top to charge it during the day.

This was a trying project, and I'm honestly very glad we are done with it. Our team didn't always work well together and I even made the front page of the Smart Surfaces website ranting about it last post. Opps/Nice.

We had Julian Bleecker from the Near Future Laboratory come this week and talk to us about Undisciplinaryism. He commented on each of our projects, but unfortunately seemed to have little to say about our groups projects.

Building the box.

Setting up the wires.

The windows are acyclic that slide down into slots in the box and are then lit by a row of colored LED's from the bottom. Patterns were laser scored into the panes to provide opportunities to light to catch.

(From rootoftwo (John Marhall) on Flickr)

The blue LED's worked very well, and it made the bubbles pane of acrylic look great.

We're onto our final groups and final projects now. I like my group, everyone seems good so far! We presented ideas for our projects today in class and it seemed from all the presentations that the professors (John Marshall, Max Shtein, Karl Daubman) were not extremely excited or happy with our ideas. I'm tempted to ask what they were really hoping for or thinking we might come up. They honestly seemed disappointed. We'll see.

Thanks for reading!

More pictures at Smart Surfaces Task 4 and John Marshall's Flickr.

Magnetic Chair (in process)

My magnetic chair is coming along full swing. I've had some hiccups of course, like the bending plywood not bending nearly as tightly as I was lead to believe it would and instead snapping. But over all, I'm ok with the bending ply not working, it was really not a very nice material to look at when layered and the whole reason I wanted to use layered veneers was for the edge quality of layered veneers.

Instead I am CNC machining the legs (well, the entire chair) out of a nice plywood from Fingerlee Lumber here in Ann Arbor (a great local lumberyard, highly recommended). I've got time on the CNC machine tomorrow morning and I'm quite excited, it will be my first time on these machines. I'm so thankful that Michigan has the world class Taubman Architecture college in the same building at the Art & Design school. Because of their huge budget and big money donors (namely the schools name sake, Taubman), they have an impressive amount of tech that I'm able to get my hands on. I love it and kinda wish the Architecture school had a design program as well. Design in the hands of artists is withering out sadly.

The CNC routers. Photo from Julian Bleecker's Flickr.

The other snafu was the magnets I had ordered online turned out to be from a company in Hong Kong. In my haste to order them at the end of a class period, I neglected to check where they were shipping from. So for the chair that I wanted to keep the sourcing local, I end up buying product from Hong Kong. The stupid things aren't even here yet. I ended up buying some neodymium magnets from Stadium Hardware here in Ann Arbor, again highly recommended.

I've worked out where all the magnets lay and will be embedded and I am quite happy with how it should come all together. Below are some screen shots from Rhino of my model and cut files. (I decided not to take the time now and render them nicely, so screen shots it is for now!)

The cut file. I'm cutting 3/4" plywood and sandwiching the pieces to create the size needed. The circles are various drill holes for the friction and magnetic held wooden rods that will hold the chair together while in its 'up' position or the magnet holes for the carrying 'down' mode.

The chair up on the left and the collapsed carrying state on the right. The hole in the back of the seat acts as a handle for carrying the chair.

Another view.

I'll post some process pictures of the CNC and the resulting pieces tomorrow. Thanks for reading!