The Fab Academy Assignment

• Make a press-fit construction kit

The Project: Laser-Cut Playing Cards Construction Kit

When reading through instructables.com, I found a great pattern for a polygon construction kit. I thought I would use it for my first laser cutter / computer controlled cutting project at Fab Academy. The instructable I reviewed is for a plastic lamp shade, but I decided to use playing cards instead and make a construction kit minus the lamp. (Also, the cards are too opaque for a lamp and I didn’t want to take a chance with heat in such a small space.) In the end, I created a sculpture construction kit.

Laser Cutting the Cards:

Laser Cutting Video:

Putting Together The Construction Kit:

This construction kit shape can be put together to form a variety of shapes.

My Final Construction:

Skills Learned

• I leaned how to use Inkscape to create files that would create cut shapes when sent to the laser cutter.

Tools Used

• Epilogue Mini Laser Cutter
• Inkscape

This article was written for the MAKE Magazine blog.

Since October of 2009, a handful of small groups of students have been taking part in an educational experiment called the Fab Academy. The Fab Academy is a distance learning collaborative that's built on the infrastructure of the Fab Lab network. Labs in Spain, Iceland, Kenya, Amsterdam, India, and Rhode Island participate in Wednesday morning lectures by videoconference. The curriculum is concentrated into two week topics with a project due at the end of each and a more ambitious annual project due at the end of the year. This series of articles for the Make: Online will follow each of the two week sessions in the curriculum and highlight the work, tools, and techniques being developed in the pilot year of the Fab Academy.

My press-fit construction kit:

FELT

First attempt in felt:

I constructed this ruffle beard from fabrics that I lasercut and hand- painted. I wear it while biking to keep my face warm.

I drew these shapes, lasercut them, and assembled them into jointed figures. The joints consist simply of short pieces of bent wire.

This is a sheet of lasercut pieces for the jointed figures. The material is matboard from a frame shop.

This is a press- fit swingset that I lasercut from 1/4" thick wood.

I drew these shapes on a computer with a mouse, which took a very long time and hurt my wrist. I am investing in a tablet so I can draw more comfortably on the computer.

Hey hey hey Fabulous Folk! Welcome to the virtual expose of my fourth Fab Academy assignment.



For assignment #4 we were asked to create a press fit construction kit. My form and function goal was a basic set of pieces that would allow freeform construction of almost any shape.

Check it out :)

A Series of un-Unfortunate Events

I tested my initial idea in matteboard and found the combination of strength and flexibility well suited for my project. I wanted to play around with thin plastics but ruled out acrylic because it's too brittle. There were a couple scrap pieces of this white bendy plastic lying around the lab so I thought I'd try it. It worked like a charm. :) Upon further investigation I learned it's called Delrin. Delrin is an industrial strength plastic thats easy to lasercut and is used for stamps.

I originally created my design for a .05" thickness material. The Delrin sheet I had is .06" thick so it fit very well. Also we had some bugs in the laser cutter settings so it perforated the entire design instead of cutting it through. This actually turned out really well in the end because when I finally got it cut, the perforations acted as little "teeth" making the joints that much stronger.

I made a bit of a tradeoff in my design between ease of assembly and structural integrity. I intentionally offset the slots from the center so as not to compromise the center of the reed pieces which seems to already be a natural stress point. I'd like to do a little bit more research to see if this tradeoff is actually necessary.

A bunch of thin strips, 1pt or so apart, vp=5 vf=700 vs=100, make a sort of crude set of sunglasses.