Designing the product

This project started as a project of love for my girlfriend. She and I both love cooking together, so she wanted a way to make cooking more fun for us. Her initial request was a bento box-esque cutting board with flaps and hinges. I was worried about food safety, cleaning, and structural integrity so I tried to design differently: a spring-loaded chassis placed over a cutting board and bin. Hypothetically, the chassis would sweep the food in.

As I prototyped, I realized that the torque on the springs would cause the chassis to shear. Additionally, most springs are not aluminum and are therefore not food safe or water safe. Because of this, I moved to a second design, where I tried to put the drawers on a dovetail track under the cutting board. Unfortunately, this proved to use too much material, so after many iterations, I settled on my final design.

NOTE: this project is only 85% completed because the COVID-19 pandemic caused the labs to shut down before I could finish it. When I'm able to get back to the lab I plan on completing the rest of the project.

Unfortunately, that failure meant it was back to the drawing board.

Making the product

After getting the design right (after a lot of retries) I moved onto making the project. The design, of course, changed after getting into the workshop. A lot of the time spent on making this project was spent on learning how to TIG weld. At first I tried using 5052 aluminum, but I was not able to weld the aluminum as smoothly. As one of the pictures below show, the aluminum would often blow out. Eventually, I had to switch my alloy to get a much smoother weld.

As for the cutting board, I got a blend of food safe and oil safe woods to use. I then cut them into a checkered pattern and clamped them together, gluing the rows. Had I had the availability to continue (the pandemic precluded me from that), I would have glued the rows together, sanded and buffed the board, and put on a bunch of layers of mineral oil.

Check out some of the pictures and video below to see some of my process.

Digital Engineering Files, Time Table & Bill Of Materials

Engineering Files

Engineering drawing for the drawer frame. A very simple shape that was easy to bend, however, the holes needed to be lined up to make sure everything fit

The handle for the long drawer. This shape was pretty hard to bend accurately and took multiple tries to get right. The short drawer handles bend in on themselves to make assembly easier.

Engineering drawing for the cutting board support. I finally landed on this design when trying to simplify the project and use the least amount of custom parts.

The drawers were made with simple geometry and made to fit the dimensions. Unfortunately, this shape did not bend well as the aluminum was too brittle to bend. Because of the time constraints, I decided to try to weld the drawers instead.

Time Table

Bill of Materials

Reflection