Week 14 - Wildcard Week
I chose to work with sheet metal for this wildcard week, to create a body for my final project, an electric ukulele. I thought the sheet metal would give a unique look to my project, and would be more interesting to me than waiting a few hours to mill a body out of wood.
I started out by prototying with a post-it note, cutting it out and seeing how it can be folded. After a few tries, I ended up with this, which I was pretty satisfied with.
Then, I copied the design into Fusion 360, using their sheet metal tool, which actually proved a little tricky. I originally designed the ukulele body in 2d, keeping in mind how the material would fold, but with Fusion’s sheet metal tool, you have to design in 3d, which is then “unfolded” into a 2d design. Therefore, I had to figure out how to create the design in 3d using the tool, then let it unfold for me. This let me visualize the design and verify things would work as expected.
Once that was done, I projected the outline of the unfolded design and made some manual tweaks. I also added some slits along the lines where I was going to fold to make it a little easier to fold by hand in the right places. Then I sent it off to the Fablight, which is an amazing machine that is incredibly easy to use.
This piece came out nicely, and I set about folding it. Due to the large number of folds it required, I could only use the metal folding machine for about three of them. The rest I hand-bent with only a tabletop and a hammer. It turned out not bad.
But, the tabs weren’t quite even and I thought I could do better, so I went ahead and cut out another one using the same sheet of metal. This time, Sara showed me how to use the vice and various other grippy tools to get a sharper bend. This one turned out much nicer.
The next step was welding. This project was small enough I could use the spot welder, which is really convenient.
It was complete! I spray painted everything black just for aesthetics, and headed over to the EDS shop to continue working on my final project.
