Danny and Michael

Post date: Oct 17, 2017 6:05:20 PM

Danny's summary plus slide 

Michael Summary Slide

  This is our first rough sketch of our design. Our idea is to make a grass coffee table. We will make the legs out of recycled wood and the base out of recycled wood. We want to make sides out of acrylic so you can see through to the grass. The grass will be on top of the coffee table. 

Mr. D told us to look up grass coffee table online to find something like we were trying to make. This one didn't use wood though. 

It was also more like a table. Right now we are focussing more on the design of the table than the grass. 

http://chinabuzz.co/grass-coffee-table/oriental-furniture-rush-grass-coffee-tableottoman-natural-grass-coffee-table-glass-top-coffee-table-with-shelf-picnyc-grass-table-haiko-cornelissen-wanted-design-new-york-design-week-ny/

This was our final sketch of our design. We decided to change our sides going up on top of our base from acrylic to wood. We decided this because we realized it is expensive and it is more efficient to use wood. Now we are going to make a cardstock prototype of our table. He also told us to look up different woods that we could use. 

Here is our cardstock prototype of our table. We took all of our dimensions and divided them by 5. That way we could see how the proportions of a scaled down model would look. We showed Mr. D and he said that on top we should have a place to put cups. so we are making a place over the top of the base for cups. Now Mr. D wants us to make a cardboard model of our design laser cut out.

Here are our final dimensions of our table. This really helped us because before we wrote this down we had our dimensions scattered around different sketches and our phones, so now that we have the full thing we can easily create the scaled down measurements for our cardboard table. 

Mr. D told us to start thinking about how the thickness of the wood would play into what our dimensions would look like when we make the actual table and our cardboard table. He told us that the thickness of the wood is 3.5x1.5. This is the wood we are planning on using the legs. Mr. D told us to start thinking about what our planter box would be. Also what type of grass and where we would get it.

We started looking at planter boxes for our table. This one was the best one that we found that fit our table (23x13). the only problem we have is we didn't want the cutouts in the planter box we just wanted 1 full space. We changed our dimensions though so the planter box could fit perfectly on our table. 

https://www.flexsealproducts.com/product/flex-seal-liquid/ 

We found this flex seal so that we could waterproof the inside and the base of the wood so that when we water the grass it won't do anything to the wood. This is really important because now we don't have to worry about the wood getting ruined from watering the grass. 

This is our ink scape of the pieces that we are using to make our cardboard. This was actually pretty hard to do because I had the right scaled down widths and lengths of every side, but our final sketch design with all our measurements really helped me figure this out faster. 

This is our final cardboard prototype table. We had to fix the dimensions on top of the table because they were off. This was our final prototype and now we are going to order the wood for our real design. It is very important that with the wood we get all the dimensions exact because after we glue and nail the wood there is no going back. 

Today we got our wood and we used the two saw machines in the wood shop to cut our pieces down to the size that we needed. all of our pieces had a width of 3.5 in so we cut the pieces down to that first then cut them to each specific size we needed. Mr. D helped us with this at the start, but we were able to do it by ourselves after the first couple times. Getting the pieces to the right size took some trial and error even though we had the exact measurements on our sheet. When we got all the pieces together we used wood glue and a nail gun to put it all together. Now we have to work on the design for the legs.

Today we got our Planter box. Mr. D told us we had to use the saw machine in the fab lab to cut it down to size. I don't think anyone has ever used the saw machine to cut the material we cut on it, so I was nervous that we might break the machine but it worked fine. Now we just have to wait for our wheatgrass to come in so we can put it in the planter box. Next, we are going to focus on the legs which are the last part we have to finish before our project is done.  

We originally were just going to make four separate legs but then Mr. D gave us the idea to make legs that looked more creative than just 4 posts. This went along well with the grass in the middle cause we are trying to make a more modern looking design, so we thought it would look better if we had different legs than what people usually have. We were messing with some different designs and made this one. We liked this design a lot. It was something that is not normally used for legs on a table. We checked with Mr. D and created the correct measurements using our table. Now we just have o connect it to the table.  

Here is our table connected to the rest of the table. We realized we needed a piece of wood in between each leg so we got that too otherwise our table wouldn't have been stable. This is definitely not what I was expecting when we originally had the idea to make a grass table. It turned out much better than I thought. It's very interesting to see where we started like a month ago to where we are right now. All we have left to do is put the grass in and then we are done.  

Here is our grass. We haven't put it on the table yet because Michaels mom bought it with him at the store when we weren't at school so he just has it in our planter box right now.  I didn't think we were going to be able to finish because just a week ago we hadn't even assembled the table yet so we were able to focus very well and use our time wisely to finish the project. We also used time out of class to work on it which really helped us get it all done in time.