"You, sir, are playing a dangerous game. Keeping this much raw... Viking-ness...contained? THERE WILL BE CONSEQUENCES!" - Hiccup Horrendous Haddock III
I once tried to cross an olympic pool in a cardboard canoe. As the water began to seep through the duct-taped hull---the smell of chlorine assaulting my nostrils, the cold water creeping up my legs---something awoke within me. My non-existent Nordic ancestry screamed for a vessel worthy of conquest: a skeid. And so, for HTMAA, I tried to make a viking skeid using parametric CAD and computer-controlled cutting.
The frame proved much tricker to make than I had imagined. In my attempt to create a sturdy hull with curved parts, I overestimated the amount of time and effort That parameterizing all the dimensions would take for something with few straight lines. In the end, I succeeded in making the frame, although time and sleep would not allow me to create a fully sea-worthy vessel.
Thereafter, it was off to the races. Using an X-tool laser cutter, my team and I characterized the cut settings for our cardboard.
Using a material test grid revealed that a 30% power with a 14 mm/sec feed rate worked well at cutting through the 4-mm cardboard in one pass, doing so with a calculated kerf of 0.23 mm. I exported the
Interestingly enough, no matter how many times I exported (and changed the export settings of) the central beam, the curve failed to render properly. Sadge. Anywho, we could keep moving forward to cut and assemble the final product.
I attempted to incorporate only press fits, and I will say that the 0.1-mm tolerance (overall, 0.05 mm on both sides of each feature) worked quite well in meeting my goals. My tabs were only about 3-mm in width, but the features transferred over with surprising dimensional accuracy (considering the kerf and initial bend of the cardboard). I will say, I was quite disappointed that my efforts in creating curved frame members did not succed as I had intended. Namely the top frame is supposed to curve upward, but the Fusion sheet metal tool does not work for a part that does not have a straight feature or reference. Ergo, I simply had to project the profile of the curved frame onto a 2D surface. The consequence? my skeid looks more like a bathtub... Uber sadge. My inner viking is not yet satisfied... but one day, one day I'll bring the skeid to completion, and it will sail across the river Charles...
"United in Duty. Bound in Destiny..." - Turaga Vakama
I'm a life-long Bionicle fan, and it always pains me that I have absolutely no idea how to identify fellow Bionicle lovers. It occured to me, why don't I make a vinyl sticker of the Three Virtues? Subtle enough to not scream "I'm an absolute geek about a storyline from the aughts" but easily recognizable by fellow members of the fandom. Using the Cricut Maker 3, and a high-resolution image of the Three Virtues archived on Biomediaproject, I crafted the following:
I accidentally used the wrong transfer sheet, rendering the surface a smidge bit sticky, but the process went smoothly otherwise!