Tuesdays, Week 3: Making things that look like stuff!
This week we got to skip all the talking and dive right into building. We quickly went back over what we did last week and then divided up into our two groups: mechanical drill arm and mechanical vacuum arm.
The Drill arm team quickly realized that the box that they made last week was far too big, so they quickly began to make a new one that would fit their arms better.
Jaro uses the bandsaw like a pro to quickly cut more pieces for the drill arm.
Once they had made four new sides, the drill team put them together to make one part of the hinged arm-piece.
Meanwhile, the vacuum team began to experiment with the PVC pipe.
Munir learns how to use a PVC cutter and uses it to cut down the long pieces into more manageable lengths.
They used joints and pieces of different lengths to figure out how to reach a vacuum to a mess that was 8 feet away from the user. The PVC turned out to be quite different from the wood that they had been experimenting with the week before, and it took a little while for them to figure out the material properties of these pipes.
Festus (Jules) experiments with joining the PVC pipe together.
Sophie and Noe collaborate with Lindsay on pipe joinery as well.
On the Drill arm side of the shop, the two arm boxes are finished and are ready to be joined together with a hinge. Even our shortest screws are sticking through the plywood into the inside of the box, so Jaro and Nolan have to come up with a solution
They experiment with washers...
and end up using both nuts and washers as spacers!
After figuring out how to attach the hinge safely, however, Nolan and Jaro realize that the arm piece is really uncomfortable to wear! They look for ways to solve this problem, and end up lining the inside with soft felt and cloth.
on the PVC side of the shop, the tinkerers are still fiddling with attatchments.
They try screws
They try clamps
While Noe and Sophie work on pipe attachments, Festus works on a way to connect the PVC pieces to the human body. He finds a suitable piece of tube, cuts it to fit on his arm, and then attaches an internal handle.
The drill side takes a break to tinker with the scraps that they created while Raj displays all that they've built this session.
Look at all we made!
See y'all next week!