Monday, August 22, 2016

New Equipment - Vacuum Former

This year we are fortunate to have a new piece of equipment in our design tech lab. It is a vacuum forming machine from Formech, a UK company. This new piece of technology will extend our creative abilities in exciting new ways. It should nicely complement our 3D printing and 3D routing tools, as those can be used to create molds (tools).  Vacuum forming technology is used widely in many different industries. If you watch the video below, you'll notice that this is how many toys are made. These machines are also used for the creation of Halloween masks, medical devices, chocolate molds and gelatin molds, to name just a few.

The video below explains what a vacuum former is and how it operates.  The challenging (and interesting!) process will be in the creation of original molds. These can be made with traditional tools or with computer aided design (CAD) tools which output to a CNC device like a router.


Monday, January 11, 2016

Boat Project Grade 8 - 2015

The grade 8 students recently finished a multi-disciplinary project where teams of four had to design and build boats capable of carrying one person across the school's pool. The boat could only be built using cardboard and duct tape. Students used Sketchup to design their craft as well as to aid in the calculation of certain mathematical tasks. The project incorporated concepts from math and science classes and it allowed us in Design Tech class to apply the important concepts of light-weighting and creating strength with shape. Good design tries to create the best solutions using the least amount of materials. Light weight vehicles are also good for the environment in that they require less energy to move. The short video below will give you a better understanding of the project.


Thursday, December 3, 2015

How to Create Strength with Shape

Students have been looking at ways to create strength using shape both for their 3D printed designs in Design Tech as well as for their boat building project in math and science classes. We've been using ideas from the Autodesk Sustainability Workshop video series.

The boat building project is providing us with excellent opportunities to apply what we are learning in class. Only being able to use a limited amount of cardboard and duct tape means we really have to think about how to best use these materials to create a functional boat. This is similar to how nature has to design: with limited supplies and energy. In the end, designing with limits creates more sustainable designs and teaches us to use our resources well.



Discussing, planning, trying.
Students began their boat projects by creating designs in Sketchup.

Tuesday, November 17, 2015

Makezine Towel RC Plane


Credit: Makezine.com
Here are some pictures from the construction of an idea found in Makezine – The Towel – a radio controlled flying wing. This is a proof of concept, seeing how 3D printing and our CNC machine can be used in various phases of construction.


Used the Laguna IQ One CNC machine to create the deck. The shape was drawn in Adobe Illustrator and then imported into Vectric V-Carve Pro to create machine paths.
This deck is where the motor mount, ESC and servos attach. Added holes to lightweight the structure using 4mm ply. This is V1. V2 had more holes. Edges were chamfered for aerodynamics and light-weighting.



Below, you see V2 with more holes. Fins are glued to wood deck for strength.



The video below shows the process of creating the pockets for the servos.


Servo sitting snug in its pocket.



Below you can see the 3D printed motor mount. Started off as a shared file on Thingiverse. (Thanks Thingiverse user garethrv.) Then it was edited in Sketchup and printed out. 



Will it fly? Almost ready to go.



Monday, June 8, 2015

CNC Router Mini Chair

     We've been getting the CNC router up and running these last few weeks, both with the drag knife and the spindle. In the mini-project below, an idea from Thingiverse was the inspiration. The Strap Chair looked pretty cool and simple enough for a starter project. The .eps files were downloaded and slightly modified in Adobe Illustrator. A kerf pattern was created to help the chair bottom bend and to create a better bodily contour. These kerfs will also make the chair lighter and increase air circulation. The modified .eps files were brought in Vectric V-Carve Pro where the tooling paths were then created.  The final chair was rescaled to about 1/7 of its original size while using 3.5mm plywood.  Overall, this downsizing approach creates a pretty good prototype without wasting much wood and using less tooling resources.  The last image at bottom shows an example of what can be done with the drag knife. This CNC tool has amazing potential.





Example of Drag Knife Cutout Below Using Cardboard


Wednesday, May 13, 2015

Water Tap Project

As discussed in class, this project is about saving water at school. In order for this to happen, we have to inform people about the faucets and toilets and how they can be turned off with a second bump.  As a graphic designer, it's your job to communicate this information.  Think of how you can communicate it briefly, entertainingly, and clearly.  Watching the typography videos in our resources folder will help you.

Your design should fit on a standard sized sheet of copier paper. We will laminate them later.

Your text message is important. So are the graphic elements.

Below are two images you can use for reference.



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Tuesday, February 10, 2015

Tech Deck Renderings

Found a really nice, simple to use rendering plugin for Sketchup. Plugin allows for shadow control, exposure control and focus control. Below are two sample images from it. It can be found at: https://getvisualizer.com/get/sketchup  Learn more about it from the video at bottom.


Tech Deck rendered from Sketchup using Visualizer plugin.