Beginning of Ferrari Project
Turns out week seven (which was a faculty non-teaching week) had a class, and a really important class too. While I was at home relaxing thinking "boy it's nice to be ahead of the game", this then turned to frustration as the next week was mid-semester break and the following was no class due to ANZAC day. Having basically three weeks and a group would have been ideal to finalise the design.
Week nine:
Come week nine, there were ten people without groups, and somehow I ended up in a group of four. And while everyone was assembling their model, we were struggling to figure out the software issues with the discontinuation of 1234Make, not ideal. I had attempted this in my break and Autodesk had suggested Fusion 360, however this program would not open the provided file so I gave up. By the end of class the Ferrari has been split using the Splitter software and we were 90% of the way to being ready to laser cut. The program dissects the model, however there are issues with where the model is cut and random skewed lines which would cause problems during the cutting, so these needed to be cleaned up. One of the guys in the group volunteered to do this over the next week, and due to the busy schedule there were no time slots available to laser cut. Small example below.
Ready to go, while everyone was forming their metal, we had access to the laser cutting machines first up. Issues which arose:
- One machine wasn't functioning 100%, wasn't cutting completely through which meant we had to do half the job with a blade. At one stage the machine basically only engraved the 3mm MDF, so we ran it through again to the same result. This caused the process to drag out massively.
- The workshop ran out of the correct timber. Fitting as I've had the worst luck in this class, we were two sheets short. I went for a walk to local hardware stores which turned out to be closed down. We managed to scrounge up some 3mm plywood to just get the model done to assemble.
- There were some issues in the design of the grooves, some weren't deep enough, had to do these by hand with a strained tendon in the thumb, just another day in the office.
In the image above you can see the laser cutter repeating the process.
Thankfully our group stayed back together and assembled the model. This took a while as we had significantly more waffles than other groups, a decision made to create a better design to shape to. We taped it up and divided it so we could start to work on it individually. Turns out we couldn't start because we didn't have the metal, so that would have to wait to next class. I have the largest part, from the windscreen all the way back to the rear of the car. It was done this way so that we could get the most model out of the fewest members.
The completed timber prototype ready for the metal to be formed. As you can see, it is made up of an incredibly detailed waffle, 23 long by 16 wide. The model itself is extremely large, right at the size limits of the laser cutter, with a hefty weight as well. Despite the complexity, the small increases in the slots for wiggle room meant that it was fairly easy to assemble, yet rigid and self supporting at the same time. We may have been the last group to form but I was very happy with our prototype.
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