cricket trophy + thoughts on documentation

I think this may have been my first comission. The project took far longer than expected, but I have become used to this difference between expectation and reality. If I seperate the work I do into things done for love and money, this is in the latter category. 

Before I recount the build processes i'm going to talk about documentation. With access to a smartphone there is no excuse not to document a project, but the act of breaking a build into chapters often interrupts the flow of making. Documentation of the build process has always felt like an afterthought to me for this exact reason. It's a tangential project in and of itself and incredibly time consuming to do well, and in this way it's a lot like a blog post. However, unlike a blog post it exists parralel to, and in competition with, what you are making. There is of course the opportunity to change ones perspective and view both building and documentation as part of a larger whole. 

I started blogging because I wasn't talking about the work that I was doing. I graduated in 2020 at the height of the first lockdown. We didn't have a ceremony, and we didn't have a show. I'll talk more about why I started blogging, although I hesitate to state the obvious, but for now I think it can be summed up in a quote from Doug Mccune's talk, Desperately Trying to Remove the Air Quotes Around the Word “Artist”; 'Make things. Tell people'. To paraphrase, 'doing the work isn't enough... You can't be a dandelion that makes thousands of seeds but hides them away from the world... don't stress out as much over whether what you are making is good enough, or if it is "done" and polished and ready for the world to see... make as much as possible and send it into the wind"

Telling people is done through documentation and i'm trying to take it as seriously as making. In the case of commisioned work it is the only part of the whole project that remains with me. To that end i've started treating the shots of my work as precious things, worthy of consideration. These images were shot on fujifilm superia 200 with an Olympus XA. I will talk more about photography, why i'm shooting film, and what my goals for these shots are in a later post. 

If you had any doubts as to what I said about documentation (or lack of it) the sum total of four photos I took should convince you. To be fair i'm sure some have gone missing, I remember doing a very basic sketch of the trophy and feeling very smug about going with my first idea for the first time in four years as it's illegal to do this at university. 

Ingredients:

1. Bat and ball provided by the client
2. Pallet wood for the base
3. Carbon fiber rod left over from a hiking pole project. wood dowel would have probably been better. certainly easier to glue
4. Astroturf samples for free! if you ever need to turf a desk sized area out of random patches of astro you shouldn't be paying for it. 
5. Brass plates were from a trophy store. The battery plate was left over stock of my own. 
6. Mixture of red and yellow flicker LED's
7. Switch from RS components 
8. Some 3D printed housing stuff
9. Cotton wool 
10. Hot glue 

Why is the next bit of text all the way down here? Ask the developers of the compose interface. 

Construction of the bits should be fairly self explanatory. bit of glue, bit of solder, make a circuit, add a battery etc. This wasn't a particularly interesting project in terms of process but I think the result is quite compelling. 

     

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my glasses (pupdate)

The grade 5 titanium arrived and was clearly a much better fit for the frames than grade 1. It is far less ductile and has some of the 'springiness' of stainless. There isn't too much to say regarding process as it remains practically identical to my last post, which is the beauty of CNC machining. Modelling and setup take a long time, but you only really have to do it once barring minor changes to the part and stock. Speaking of minor changes, tabs were added to increase the surface area of the glue and the depth of cut was increased to ensure full penetration of the stock (kinky). 

This doesn't capture the silkiness of
the sandblasted finish 

fig 1.

This second run came very close to being the last but unfortunately there were some issues: 

1. On test fitting the arms whilst the part was in the machine it seemed tight. Instead of trusting the measurements we opened it up 0.25mm (the diameter of an accupuncture needle) and consequently the fit was sloppy which meant the arms had far too much play up and down. Edit: I've just realised that this probably meant 0.5mm total which would explain it 
2. The hinge snapped in exactly the same place as my original glasses (fig 1.). This is evidently a weak point which I will have to strengthen. I'm fairly confident that this piece can't be solid as I think it is used to open the frame up for lenses. 
3. On closer inspection of my canvas (shown in my last post) I had neglected to model a small indention of about 1mm at the end of the hinge which allows the arm to slot in and rotate around. This was cut with a dremel on this part but this is easily added to the model and fusion will update the toolpaths to suit automatically.

Solutions and other points:

1. For the fit of the arms, stick to the measurements! There is always self destructive tendency to assume you know better than the tools which is apparently emboldened by constantly being proven otherwise. 
2. For the snapped hinge there are a few options but I think the most logical is probably just to offset the toolpath by 0.5mm making the frames that much thicker. Titanium work hardens very easily. At a molecular level a work-hardenable (new word?) material exhibits a 'defect free pattern' which is to say it's molecules are aligned in a consistent pattern that is deformed when the material is work hardened through say, bending, squeezing, sheering etc. These deformations create obstacles and 'pinning points' in the materials structure which compound, impeding the motion of other molecules and therefore increase the materials strength through resistance to further change. Unfortunately by deforming the material and introducing these deformations, you also make the material more brittle as the molecules are less able to slide past one another as they do in a ductile (pliable) material. Instead the molecules are forced up agaisnt one another until breaking point and the material snaps as it did in the hinge of these glasses. If it seems like I just read the wikipedia article before writing that, it's because I did. Fortunately there is a process (and another wikipedia article) called Annealing that involves heating a material to above its recrystalisation temperature which allows the molecules to 'relax'  back into alignment reintroducing ductility. Unfortunately, for titanium this occurs at 600-750C which are the kind of temps I do not have access to. 
3. The finish this leaves had me swearing oaths. I'm not one for finishing (honesty of process and all that) but this may have changed my mind, it doesn't hurt that it's also a very practical way of removing burrs left by the machining process.    

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