Week #4 - Project 1 planning and execution

 To start I drew my design out on some tracing paper.

Then I made a layered version of the design and cut it out so that I could visualize how the final result would come together.

After I had a design I started making my design in rhino 8, improving areas that were lackluster in my laser cutter test. I started by making a series of 4 squares so that I would have a reference point for the exact center later and a way of creating the outer circle with the exact dimensions that I wanted. I also offset this outer circle so that I would have the basis for my inner design to work off of.

Now that I had the main circle, I drew in the petals using a picture reference -not shown in my screen capture. 

I then trimmed the lines on the petals in order to keep the design clean as I worked

Then, in order to create an interesting detailed outer circle, I lined the outer circle with little circles using the rotate command.

I then trimmed away the parts of the little circles and petal lines that I did not need.

Once that was done, I had to trail and error diameters of circles to find which one would rotate around perfectly as I had done in my hand drawn version of the design. 

Fixing an area that was weak on my laser cut test, I drew crosses through the interior circles and extended the one line from each interior circle to the center circle. I also offset the interior circles so that I would be able to cut out the quadrants later.

I offset all of the necessary lines, and created a circle effect around the center circle similar to what I did with the outer circle in the beginning.

Now it was time to insert the hatching so that I could create a sense of depth within the design.

I then copied over different sections of my design, and made my leaves - which I forgot to document but it followed much of the same process as creating the petals. I then made the layers distinct by making the cut layer red.

After discussion with my instructor, I decided that the petals would look far better - and aid the objective of the design more - if I separated them and placed them on their own layers in the final construction. I copied over parts of the design, trimmed away unneeded sections and added supports so that everything would still fit together. I nested all of the pieces inside of the boundary of the piece of wood that the pieces would be cut from and ended up with this. 

Once I had the pieces cut out of the wood and assembled my project looked like this, I did put some very tiny holes into the petals only to discover that I did not have any thread small enough to go through the holes without breaking:

Construction:

I began assembling with wood glue and clamps, as the tech recommended because of my material, however I found that this had a lot of clean up especially as it did not dry clear. I switched pretty quickly to super glue, which I was able to apply more precisely and dried clear to make for easier clean up.

What I would change:

The petals. They feel lacking in detail compared to the rest of the work. I also realized that figuring out where all of the petal sections on the top layer fit was a pain, so I would alter my design so that the top layer of petals held together so that it would be less of a puzzle. I would also make it so that the bottom layer of petals had more of the support structure that would be hidden from the top layer of petals, gluing the layers together with so small of a surface area was extremely difficult.