INDN 342: Metal Returned

After many weeks of waiting for my parts to be made, they finally made their way back to me. Fortunately I was one of the first students to get my plans and design into Metco Engineering, so as a result, I got my metal back almost first. However, the delay meant that I had only a week until the final hand-in, meaning that the powder coating had to happen in the next two days so that I could get my photos and video done on the Saturday before the hand-in.

One thing that had to happen very quickly was that I had to give the insides of my metal collars a bit of a clean up in order to allow the wooden legs to fit into them. As long as I made them fit, it was all going to look good from here on out. One of the considerations I had to make was the way in which I was going to connect the legs to the metal. Since the metal was going to be powder coated, I decided to make the legs flow nicely into the metal, as opposed to having some sort of joining system that would impede the look of the stools.

INDN 342: Manufacturing Begins!

Now I'm in the much more relaxed phase, where I outsource everything and then stress about it not getting done. Oh wait! That's not relaxing. That's me standing in the corner of the room shuddering in fear as I mash the screen of my phone worrying about the fact that I might graduate and have no final projects to show for it. I'm not stressed. I'm mortified.

This is my de-stress and vent zone, so to all of you who actually read my blog about my path through the design-o-sphere as I come ever closer to the point of graduating, I'm sorry about that, but this month is going to be the most stressful of my life. I don't even know what's wrong with me at the moment, it's like the final hurdle I have to cross is the most difficult one. And this last one is causing me to run into so many problems I've managed to circumvent for the better part of the last three years.

Lethargy, laziness, serious procrastination, hair-pulling stress, the works. Somehow I managed to avoid a lot of that in the past three years, but now it's all piling on top of me. But I can do it! I can face the hardest time of my life and come out a stronger, better person and a designer. It's just going to take a considerable effort!

After the reconsideration for aluminium, I went and acquired a 2.5m tube for the collars of my legs. Obviously, 2.5m is way too much for my needs, so I'll have to try and find someone who might buy some off me. The Al is really strong! I was very surprised by how intensely strong it was for the weight that it was.

In terms of timber, I bought a fair bit of American Ash ($120 of it!) for the legs. This timber started out a little bit big, so I planed it down to size. Once I'd done that, I could start laying out the legs in the space of the timber, to prepare the legs for routing.

Once I had the aluminium tubing in the workshop, I cut it into small pieces (81mm long) to make up the collars for my legs. These pieces I then chucked on the lathe and faced them off to clean them up, after which I gave them a clean up on the inside with a burr removal tool, and then a spin around the outside ends to clean them up with a file.