Independent Creative Project

Independent Creative Project.

Andy King

Goals:

When I started going into this project, I mainly just wanted to do some kind of board game, but the only thing that ever entered my mind was chess, and I had just completed a chess related project so I wasn't eager to go strait back on that track,  instead someone, who unfortunately I can't remember, suggested the idea of a cribbage board. I have never played Cribbage but when I searched online at some of the boards that they had available I saw that the design was relatively simple but also would provide me with the ability to justify the use of multiple materials and machines in order to complete my project. I settled on the final idea that I would make a small handheld board and that I would make some pieces along side it in order to make it playable.

Procedure:

Design:

After I first looked at some images online, I immediately started copying them onto my paper, from there I thought of various ways I could enhance the board itself, mainly through the use of themes. I thought of 6 themes in total (which can be seen on my design below at the bottom of the page) however I would end up later not so much scraping these ideas but rather ignoring them as I needed to focus on getting my design to work first and foremost and I would also come up with better ideas later. 

Fusion 360 Step 1: Game Piece Measurement

My first objective was not to start making the game board itself, but was instead to figure out the correct game piece size. I had previously discussed with Mr. Supiro that using a 1/8 square inch drillbit would be optimal and my first step was to print out some small game pieces so I would know what diameter would be best for fitting in my game pieces. I extruded four cylinders, they had a 0.122, 0,12, 0.118, and 0.155 inch diameter respectively. I subsequently sent an email to Mr. Supiro so he could print it and I got four indistinguishable cylinders, at least to me, so I differentiated them by coloring them. Red was the largest, yellow was the 2nd largest, green was the 3rd largest, and blue was of course the smallest. The cylinders were then put away and the real work could begin.

Fusion360 Step 2: Game Board Configuration

By far the longest and most tedious part of the entire design, actually making the game board wasn't easy and many times I would get frustrated by small errors I didn't know how to resolve or watching youtube tutorial videos that alternated between beginner level and advanced. To start I created 3 circles, each with a 0.125 diameter. Defining them properly was tedious as each individual circle needed to be set to the origin on the 3d plane of Fusion which was time consuming. Afterwards each circle was extruded 0.2 inches upwards (or technically sideways as I had accidentally selected the wrong plane but didn't know it) and I started to put them into a square I had quickly streched out. Mr. Supiro pointed out that having a 3d rectangle and then having the 3 identical cylinders be negative extrusions and just moving them around inside of it was a better idea than creating the square last and then setting them to negative extrusions so I did that. At his recommendation I also watched some tutorials on rectangular and circular patterns, the videos themselves were hard to focus on due to the noise of the classroom but eventually I had learned at set out pattern my cylinders, instead of using a primitive copy and paste which is what I was doing previously. After completing the bottom two patterns I realized the top pattern wasn't going to be so easy, and I realized that I needed a pattern on path instead of a circular or rectangular path. That was easy enough to figure out, but there was one small issue displayed in the images below where my cylinders didn't allign with each other how I wanted them to, but eventually that was sucessfully resolved. With all of these complete I was ready to move onto bigger things in the post processing.

Fusion360 Step 3: Preparing for the CNC Machine.

Once I had the design post processing wasn't to difficult. Mr. Supiro was there to help and I went through it very quickly, I choose a plank of wood that I would cut my design out of, placed it in the CNC machine, and watched it cut my design. Except it didn't, the CNC machine went just slightly to the right of my design, and then started, on the correct x and z axis to cut my design, but for some reason the y axis was off so the machine was just cutting empty space. I quickly disabled it and went back to Fusion where I realized the problem was it thought my design was horizontal when it was actually vertical, and as previously mentioned it was on the wrong plane, so it had to be ajusted. Once I got through those things on the third email to the CNC I got the correct design.

CNC Machine

Using the CNC machine for the second time is so much easier than the first, Mr. Supiro was there to help me run through the checklist but I now could've don most of the stuff completely independently now and most times I already knew what button he wanted me to press. Regardless on the third attempt my cribbage board finally was brought into existence and the CNC slowly and monotonously drilled the hundreds of holes that I had specified in my design. I sat by it with the vacuum to remove any dust it had swept up and in 10 or so minutes my design was complete.

Finalizing Game Pieces

My design came out exactly as I intended it, and now I was set to finally get those game pieces done that I had designed weeks ago by this point. Fortunately Mr. Supiro had safely stored the 4 test cylinders and now I was able to see which one was best. I settled on yellow with a diameter of 0.12 inches and quickly went into Fusion and using that diameter designed some far nicer pieces actually intended to be played with. I ended up printing 9 because they were all so small and losing them was a near inevitability when playing for long enough, so it would be good to have extras (also they were very small so some of them might come out defective). I did end up having to pry some pieces of loose plastic off of these new pieces with a tool but other than that this went very smoothly. This was done using the second machine for this project, the 3d with assistence from Mrs. Bender.

Conclusion

Overall this project was far smoother than my last, mostly because of built up experience now allowing me to use Fusion more effectively overall and the fact that I generally had to use less Illustrator which I'm not really a fan of. I also discovered helpful features such as a pattern with made copying and pasting virtually obsolete, as well as finally figuring out the difference between the two selection box Fusion has, one only selecting entities entirely within the box, and the other snagging any that have any amount in the box. Making the overall design in Fusion was also much easier then it was in Illustrator because of the three dimensionality of it making it easier to visualize and the vastly superior user interface that Fusion enjoys over Illustrator. On top of all this a nice bonus was that I used few materials and didn't at all have to scrape any physical designs. My project wasn't without problems however. I spent far too much time on the 4 cylinder prototypes and should've prioritized just getting them finished instead of messing with the length using rudimentary copying and pasting which could've been avoided using patterns. Laser cutting in particular at the very end caused my problems. The laser cutter did things I didn't understand and the problems weren't exactly easy to resolve, and each time there was an error I only found out as I was watching it being cut onto my board. Keeping track of all of those small games pieces was also generally difficult and there was really no where else to put them other than on to the cribbage board as active pieces. I would also ideally like to change the plastic material the game pieces themselves are made of, or use a different machine, as they were prone to defects due to their small size, and I didn't enjoy using pliers to get these small defects off. It also would've been ideal if I had more time, in order to add those themes I had originally thought of, I could've used hypoxy to shape them and then put a nice coat of paint on top. If I did this again I would have enlarged the holes to 0.25 inches to make my board significantly larger and turn it into a real game board instead of a travel edition, allowing me to also add some additional fun stuff. Overall though I'm very happy with how this turned out and I just wish I had more time to work on it.

Images:

Top left is my Finalized Fusion 360 Design for the main board, but without the playing pieces. Top right is the finalized playing pieces, I unfortunately don't have the original test pieces design (blue) but they were just cylinders and so the design wasn't very interesting. Bottom Left is my board with 8/9 of my playing pieces, I have already lost one good thing I printed more. Bottom Center is the orginal testing pieces I used to find the optimal diameter for the actual playing pieces on the top right. Finally, the bottom right is the full board, with total of 130 holes cut into it.