Week 3 - Journal

Ideation

A fast search lead me to this multilevel pen holder, At the beginning it seemed to be difficult to design, but a challenge like this enthusiasm me.

click to go to source

Design/Preparation Process

Software and Material used:

This week -like the previous one- was a great learning phase, Fusion360 is a very useful/easy to learn tool.

I have never thought that the result will be that fast. here are the designs I make through the second week with Fusion 360.

For the laser cutting a 3mm thickness Plywood is used.

Design and Preparations:

2.5D part:

At first I attended to apply a modification to the inspiring design, to make it unique and more useful to me.

First things first when I opened fusion 360 I saved the project and set a descriptive name "pen holder" and make sure it is at the correct folder.

Each part of the design must be set as "new component" -from create list- to make is easy to joint parts together lately.

I choose the first component to be the base, to make it the one reference all other parts related to.

I set the base dimensions to 200*150mm then add sides and back taps.

Talking about tabs for the whole design I set myself a role which is:

tap length=side length /(2*number of taps+1)

this will result in a symmetric sequence of taps as shown.

this also will fit with t-slot.

At the center of the side a t-slot is drown simply with 2 rectangles, one for the screw to fit in (3*8mm) and the other to hold the nut(2.4*5.5mm) as shown.

The next step is to apply Extrude to wanted parts by 3mm.

Now with right click on the component "base" I set it to be ground this is important for jointing parts, if no part set to be ground the orientation may change.

and the red sign is showing that this object is the ground.

I added a new component "drawer top" which is the first parallel plane to the ground, and it is almost the exact same design except for one dimension.

As the previous part and for the whole coming parts each component is extruded by 3mm.

I draw the back side with an approximate dimensions just to project the taps to the sides, and kept changing them all along the process and this is the final look.

As I have back and base parts ready it is time to apply the first joint by selecting the taps side lines in both parts.

Doing the same with the "drawer top" with the back.

Continuing with the second part that is parallel to the base.

Note: it would be better to project the taps holes in the back side, but I just went through the most basic way.

The first side is added as a new component, and the base thickness side is selected to be the skitch plane.

After setting the outer dimensions, I used "project" feature the get the taps holes positions. and the extrude the side.

Note that "project" can be found in "create" list.

Repeating these steps to set the dimensions of the other side.

It is preferred to apply joint to the base (ground) if it is possible.

Now by adding the divider of the drawer place and joint it with the base it would look like this.

The last two parts are the upper divider and the front part, here the right part is designed to put notes paper in it and curve in the front part is made to make it easy to take the papers out.

Using drag &drop to bring in the M3 screws and nuts, and apply Joint to fit them into the T slots.

By now it all done with the design, the next step is to prepare it for the laser cut.

Development/Implementation Process

From Fusion360, by activating the component and choose from create list "save DXF for laser cutting" this will lead to execute a DXF file with the outlines of the extruded parts in the skitch.

Note: This is an extension that need to be installed to fusion360.

In RDworks I imported the parts one by one and added a simple text to be scanned and set the power and speed parameters for the machine as following :

cut: speed= 40mm/s & power=60

scan: speed=300mm/s & power=20

After choosing "Download" in RDworks to sent the the design file to the Elmalki laser cutter memory, I had to set the origin where the machine will start and press on "frame" to make sure that no parts of the design is out of the plywood sheet.

Video1

video2

Overcoming Challenges

Setting the parts to get the best use of the wood sheet was the most struggling part, and with trial &error I think i got the best orientation for the parts.

Final Project

As the graduation project will be multipart so it is important to learn how to design them in a good way so they will fit together with no problems

Assignment Design Files

DXF files

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