LAMP

Our material is MDF and PVC flexible,  for the other 2 excises we used MDF only, so this time we wanted to do something different.

We started from thinking what is the biggest difference between these two material.  Well, one is hard, and the other is soft, and can be bent.

So we decided to use this property, and tried to form a sphere.

What we did is cutting a sheet, and then it could be stretched, then became a semi-sphere.

Then we used the joints we printed to connect 2 semi-sphere.

To provide the force to maintain the shape, we made a another bigger joint to hold a stick in the middle.

During the milling process used a zinc thickness of 1 millimeter. The design is reflected in the creation of 2D file which bending procedure would  assume 3d shape of a sphere, and as such is designed as a small table lamp that had four legs, central / inner part with a hole for the possible installation of lighting and eight side portions to form a spherical shape.

During this process there has been a mistake when setting the controls in RhinoCam, where small contiguous parts were cut from the outside insted  of cutting from  inside so that the main holders were torn during this process. On the other hand, it is noted that the material behaves very well during this process, particularly for large parts, leaving a very accurate curvature  and clean forms.

For experimenting with the material we used a 1.2 mm thickness sheet. Before starting the milling the brass sheet was attached to the machine’s board using double sided tape and 6 screws distributed on the edges. The RinoCam file was set using “2D Engraving” in 2 steps of 0.6 mm each; the first one contoured all the triangles of the origami pattern and the second one cut them leaving 0.6 mm bridges that allowed us to fold the piece. In spite of the total depth of the milling was 1.2 mm as the material, some areas were not cut though. The solution found for next experiments was to increase the total depth of the cut.

For experimenting with the material we chose 5 mm thickness felt. The sphere is composed by 8 triangular pieces of 2 types and together they create a simple anchor joint . By testing the joint we were able to assay the tensile strength of the material which turned out to be good. Since the material is a soft textile, it does not keep the shape so the sphere looked squared depending on the angle of the viewer.

Laser cut parameters:

- Power: 130

- Speed: 60

- Height: 2

The piece was made in the Makerbot 3D printer. The joint consists in a hard center with 12 arms made to be attached to brass triangles. Each arm has a 1 mm of diameter hole to lock the arm into the brass by adding an additional stick piece. The precision of the 3D printer is not enough for the dimension of the hole and the arms were too long so they easily break.