Week of 2/2 - 2/6

This week, I worked on my boat project and the Word Clock Project. The beginning of this week, I continued creating the model of the boat in Fusion. I had to create the sketches for the individual ribs on the boat along with the design for the cuts to have the ribs interlocked with one another. Creating these ribs was a very systematic process, but it was very tedious to go through and create each one.

An issue I ran into while designing the boat was creating the side ribs for the boat. Moving across the sides of the boat are rails that should closely resemble the ribs on the bottom of the boat. However, I had some difficulty designing the side ribs of the boat in a way that looked uniform with the rest of the ribs while keeping the shape of the boat. I tried to design the topmost rib which took up the better part of Tuesday just for it to turn out bad. But now that I know (generally) how I should approach these side ribs, I plan on redesigning them on Friday.

On Wednesday, Kim, Bella, and I spent our time in the Machine Shop preparing the CNC Router to cut out the wooden frame of the Word Clock. We had to take all of the stuff off of the router to clear it off. After this, we had to take off the tape from the boards that were taped to the router. After removing the board, we taped our wood into place on the router and ensured the files were ready to cut out on Thursday.

We began cutting out the parts of the frame on Thursday. Our first cut was pretty successful despite a few things. The vacuum on the router was unable to pick up a lot of the sawdust that the machine produced as it was cutting. This was mostly due to the long pieces of wood that got stuck in the vacuum during the cutting process. Because of this, once the cut was finished, I had to vacuum up all the dust to prepare for our next cut. After that, we had to pass over the cut one more time to remove the overlap lines that were created during the cut. We've cut out most of the pieces; now we just need to drill out the holes.