by Adwoa Asare

Cutting, Drilling, Joining

Box Cutter: The box cutter was used to cut cardboard into 40 x 60 cm rectangles that would fit into the lab’s laser cutter. When using the box cutter, it was important to stand out of the way of the blade sice the way it is made requires you to cut towards yourself. It was also important to have a sacrificial layer underneath the cardboard we were cutting so that the table would remain unscrathed. It was necessary to apply a decent amount of pressure to cut through all the layers of the cardboard in one go. We also clamped the cardboard to the table to keep it from sliding.

Saws: There were two main kinds of saws: push saws and pull saws. Push saws are more abraisive to the material you are cutting on the push stroke and pull saws are more abraisive on the pull stroke. This can be observed by the amount of force you have to use depending on the stroke and also the amount of material removed. When sawing it was important for us to secure the materials we were cutting (wooden rods and acrylic rods) by using clamps that held the materials to the side of the table. For safety reasons, we kept our fingers clear of the saw and the materiall that was being cut.

push pull saws hack saw

Drills: Depending on the shape and size of the object being cut as well as the level of precision needed, it may be necessary to use a drill press or a hand drill. The drill press was turned off when the drill bit was being exchanged and the material was being clamped in order to ensure our safety. To switch the drill bit, a key was used to loosen the shaft so that the old bit could be removed and a new bit could be put in and then they key was used to tighten the shaft around the new bit. A wood block and clamp were used to fasten the material(an aluminum plate) being cut to the base of the drill press, then the drill press was plugged in and turned on. To drill through the material, the handle on the right side of the drill press was slowly rotated downward to lower the drill bit through the material. When working with hard metals it is important to make sure a long ribbon of metal is not forming around the drill bit because it can be a slicing hazard. For the hand drill, we secured the piece of plastic material we were were going to drill through using a vice. Since the drill bit we were using was a rather large size it was helpful to have guide holes drilled with a smaller drill bit first to keep the drill from walking.

Joining: There are many different methods for joining things but we chose to focus on glue. Specifically we used super glue and wood glue. Glues generally have instructions on how best to use them so we made sure to follow those instructions as we went along. With the super glue we applied it to the base of small aluminum rods we had cut earlier and inserted them into the holes we hand drilled into the plastic. We were careful not to touch the glue for safety reasons. With the wood glue we applied some to each of the wooden blocks we were trying to join, allowed it to solidify slightly, then presses the glued side of the blocks together and secured them with a clamp. Wood clue has a long curing time so they were not done drying by the end of our lab time

Final Project Progress

Today I…

  • sautered wires onto a water pump for the watering system
  • shrink wrapped the sautered wires to protect the connection

sautered pump