Week of 9/29-10/3

To recap last week, I focused much of my time on hanging up the signs around the shop. I was able to hang up all the signs on the walls on my own, and for some of the higher signs I needed to hang up, I asked Matt and Kim to help me out with those. With that help, I was able to hang up all the signs around the shop. This week. I started by fixing some of the signs I put up the week before. When we returned on Monday, the sign for the soldering station had fallen, so I just put the sign up on the wall next to the Tetris board in front of the station rather than hanging it from the ceiling where it was before.

I began to work on a new project this week - a wooden poster for my room. I wanted to base the poster on a song that I really like - Black Star by Radiohead. So far, for this poster, I have sketched the design that I wanted and designed the basic details in CAD. After doing this, I talked to Mr. L about ideas on how to make one of the stars on the poster spin to make the poster a little more dynamic. After some brainstorming, we came up with a mechanism similar to one used for fidget spinners. The middle of a fidget spinner is a bearing connected by two button-like inserts that the spinner can be held with. This is the mechanism I hope to design to create the spinning star on my poster.

Before I design that mechanism, though, I took on the project that Mr. L had to cut something out on the water jet. The design for the piece is pretty simple; it is a rectangle with 7 circles that are pretty much equidistant from each other. The tricky part was just making sure all of the circles were in the exact right space. The first design I made was not very precise, so I fixed up some of the measurements, and the new design was pretty much perfect. I then started to add the words and numbers to the design in Inkscape, but I have not finished that yet. I hope to design the spinning mechanism for the poster soon and complete the part for Mr. L on Friday.