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.