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.

3d printing covered the design of small joints of powder. The exercise was designed to study the possibilities of connecting elements in the x, y, z axis using a single type of connector where you can connect elements only at an angle of 0 degrees or 90 degrees. By rotating these elements can be obtained very interesting shapes. On the other hand, as a result is obtained very fragile connectors and it was necessary to strengthen them with glue.

Digital Fabrication – Methacrylate Spheres using laser cutting

At first we did design of aluminium sphere as constructive assembly of joints and folding. Design strategy was based on using the 0.3 mm thick aluminium and the EndCut Mill tool 0.3 mm in diameter. In this case one mill cut matches thickness of material, making joints possible.

As we starded to mill our material, we realized that parts designed for joints are too thin and fragile to be succesfull. Because of that we focused only on the folding of aluminium. This was done by engraving the folding lines.

We also had problems with melting of aluminum during the milling process. But we were able to cut of the melted part manually.

So we made some experiment and….

We ddeveloped the alien cork sphere!