Assignment 3 - Physical Model Construction

I was very psyched as this was my first time using laser cutter! The construction of the physical model was relatively successful, despite there were some unforeseen problem when it came to the actual construction of the model:

1. I didn’t take into consideration the physical property of the material I used. As I used 1mm white cardboard), the material was sometimes not strong enough and as a result many parts (especially the columns that goes through the bulging column in the northern apartment) was broken during construction. Lucky that I made quite a few spare duplicates or else it would be a nightmare to cut the parts!
2. While the notches fit very nicely together, the slots for the columns to go through in the bulging facade was not big enough for the columns to go through (many of them were crooked when I tried to squeeze them through the slots. I had to manually enlarge the slot in order to make that happened… and you can imagine how painful it was when there were 117 of them!!!
3. The notches that supports the floor slab are extremely tiny and I had to slot them into the notches using a tweezer and it was very repetitive. I should have designed the system to avoid that.

My laser cut sheets!

Floor slabs

notched columns and tiny parts for supporting floor slabs (they are only 5mm by 6mm!!)

 lost so many of these.... lucky I made spares!!

Tiny parts notched into columns

slotting the tiny parts into place... almost finished...

FINISHED!!

Lastly, I think the fabrication process was interesting and fulfilling and I feel the itch to mention a few things that everyone should consider when using laser cutter for modelling:

1. Think about fabrication when designing your algorithm and plan ahead.
2. When there are identical parts, make sure you make spare parts, as in most of the case manually cutting the parts will be extremely painful (if even possible).
3. Make sure you design a system that minimise the manual construction time, as normally it takes less time to design the algorithm then to manually construct the model (the tiny supporting parts took me 3 hours to slot them in the right place!).