[Thu Mar 29] Last day of boxes

I started the class by cutting the design from last class:

I cut two of them to make sure they work before I moved on. I assembled them, fingers crossed....

But the sides were screwed... : -(

At least the hinges worked fine. The sides could be easily bent, although I was struggling a little cutting the hinges. I tried speed 0.5 and the hinges were melted but if I used 0.6, the other lines were not cut through. Therefore I set the speed to 0.5 first to cut through all the lines then set the speed to 0.9 to re-cut the melted hinges... It came out to be a little ugly but at that point, I wasn't concerned about that...

I asked Oscar for help about the screwed part. We decided that if I move the holes the distance of the skewed gap, they should close up. I did that but it turned out that only fixed half of the sides. The rest of the sides were still screwed... Therefore, I fixed the other sides as well. Oscar also suggested that I move the holes and the splits on the longer ends to one corner so it looks neater. I didn't bother to move those on the shorter ends because those sides already fit perfectly. The diagram looked like this:

It sounds pretty easy but there were lots of spatial mapping involved that I was struggling with. It took me a while to figure out the measures and persuade myself that this box can indeed be made out of three identical pieces...

Anyways, I came up with the above diagram and cut three in a row. I assembled them with fingers crossed...

And it worked!!! I finally have a box now!

That was exciting. The problem is the opening is "springy" but cannot stay closed. Therefore, Oscar directed me to look at Kelsey's dovetail design:

(Taken from Kelsey's blog)

If I can do a dovetail design to "click" the lid so it can stay close, that'd be a more functional box. Oscar suggested that I could even make three sides "clickable" - looking at the second last picture above, I can make three sides close together using techniques such as dovetail or even magnet (that's just an idea...) I tried dovetail before and found it really hard to control. Since my material is thicker than Kelsey's, I imagine that directly copying her measures wouldn't work. There is also the possibility that my material is too thick that it does not have enough stretch that dovetail technique requires. But if I had more time, that would have been the first thing I work on.

This project took me three weeks to finish and as I said, there are still lots of things that can be done to improve my design. I think it's a great project to start with because it made me experience all the subtleties in the design and manufacturing process that I could not have imagined if I did not go through this process myself. I definitely became more aware of the engineering designs around me (which is almost everything) and thought more about how they could be done and the difficulties in doing them. I also decided that I am not a mechanical type of person because I am not very good at 3D imagination. At least between mechanical and electrical, I prefer the latter.