INDN 211: Primary Production Phase

Well, now I am fully into production mode. I started working today on the wood lathe, which was an interesting, at times difficult, but all of the time very, very fun. The way the wood lathe just allows you to very quickly sculpt a piece of wood into a rotationally symmetrical form is fantastic. I love it.

So, I started out with my stem, so that I could practice removing a lot of wood and also as it allowed for a lot of room for error. The general sculpting of the wood took little time once I realised how easy it was to take off large amounts of wood very quickly.

Once I had my stem form, I drew out the forms for my 4 grips, and then started sculpting them. The form was rather similar, but the diameters of the sections were the really important parts. The front of the grips needed to be 20mm, while the back end needed to be 25mm, so that it would fit together with the grip well.

After about 2 hours in the wood workshop, I finally had my little family of grips  all done and dusted. However, that said, I still had to sculpt the actual sections into the grips where the fingers would hold. This took a careful amount of planning and marking out, as the grips I had now designed were a bit different to the original clay forms I was working with. So I marked the forms out , and then I used a circular sander to carve in the grooves.

At the larger grips this was rather easy, however it quickly got much more difficult when I got the second smallest. The last one I decided would not have any grip segment, to add to the difficulty of the training.

Following that section of the work, I then had to sand down the sections, as the circular sander had done a good, fast, but rather rough job. So the notches still needed a lot of refining. But, once I reached that stage, it was time to start thinking about the crucial element of the project, the vacuum forming.

The way I had planned to do my vacuum forming for this project was to mould the small raised sections out of clay directly onto the wood grips, and the remove the clay and place it onto a board I could do my vacuum forming over. This was a bit of a concern at first, as I really wasn't sure how it would work. Fortunately, it worked beautifully, however, the clay was a one-time-use. The clay somehow lost its consistency as it had the plastic shrunk over it. The clay was no longer staying together and keeping its form.

But, since it worked perfectly, this actually wasn't a concern at all.