Team: Yashaswini Apte & Carlo Caltabiano
CONCEPT:
For the bench we decided on a sculptural look. Considering it was to be fabricated out of plywood we wanted to counter the rigidity of the waffle structure with fluidity of the surfaces. It is designed as a two seats accessed from opposite sides. The interplay of surfaces and heights creates the back rest and seating for each side at the same time maintaining the homogenity of the bench.
PROCEDURE FOR CREATING WAFFLE STRUCTURE OF BENCH:
Step 1: We started with the bench template. Applying cage edit the bench was modified along the control points to the desired shape keeping the two side surfaces intact to allow for connection with other benches. The height and widths were modified within the control box.
Step 2: Once the bench shape was finalised and we ran a check for the following the external parameters of the bounding box, we proceeded with creating the waffle structure to obtain surfaces for the laser cutting. Firstly the various layers were created in the rhino file.
Step 3: First we off-setted the outer surface to the required thickness to have two separate surfaces. Instead of countouring we introduced planes in the X-Y direction. For this a plane was introduced along one end of the bench for planes along the X-direction and arrayed along the length of the bench. Similar thing was done along the Y direction. We now had intersecting planes in both directions.
Step 4: The outer part of the planes were trimmed along the outer surface of the bench to get the outer ring. The inner part of the plane was trimmed along the inner surface of the bench. The trimmed panel was thus achieved in the X direction and similarly obtained for the sections in the Y direction.
Step 5: Changing the layer the planes were intersected to get the lines of intersection between the surfaces in the X & Y direction.
Step 6: Two solid pipes were drawn for X and Y direction, put in separate layers and copied at every intersection – one for the intersection along the X direction and the other for the intersection along the Y direction. The diameter of the pipe was kept as 2.8mm.
Step 7: Using ‘Intersect’ the pipes were intersected with the planes. This was done separately for the planes in the X and Y direction keeping only the required layers switched on.
Step 8: The surfaces were then unrolled using ‘Unrollsurface’ separately in the X and Y direction.
Step 9: the ribes were gruped an arranged on the plywood sheet size of 1.2×2.5m using ‘Rhino nest’. The curves were simplified using Curves Edit tools- ‘ simplify lines and cuerves’ and saved as a .dxf file for printing.
