Task: For your final IDEA assignment you must complete the following challenge: Reduce, Reuse or Recycle items to help reduce our impact on the environment. Every day we use items that are meant to be thrown away. Your challenge is to take these items (and any you can make in the lab) to create a project that will lessen the amount of these items going into our landfills.
Planning
The number one material that's added to landfills every year is plastic. Polyvinyl chloride also known as polyvinyl or vinyl, commonly abbreviated PVC, is the world's third-most widely produced synthetic plastic polymer, and I just so happen to have quite a few, scratched up vinyl records at home that are no longer playable. When I researched into different ways to reuse and or recycle vinyl records I found an entire community of artists who use old vinyls to make clocks. My partner Jill had some old clocks lying around in her attic, and now I have my idea put together. I've been into the Game of Thrones series, so I figured I'd attempt to make a clock of the House of Targaryen Crest. At first I though it would be really easy to just laser cut the vinyl, vinyl cut the clock stickers and then install the clock, BUT... You can't laser cut PVC, because the extreme heat will produce chlorine gas, and even though we have the exhaust fan this still isn't safe. So the next best thing? Use the CNC Router.
Image Tracing in Illustrator
Our first step was to image trace our designs. Mine was this crest...
One the image is traced and I have removed any color, I can export it as a DWG file.
Extruding DWG in Fusion 360
Since creating my VFD Maze, I learned that you can extrude images much faster and ore efficiently in Fusion 360. All you have to do t go to under Projects and upload the DWG file.
Here it is in Fusion. I make sure I am in SCULPT and that my units are in inches.
Then I can change SCULPT to MODEL and under "Create" I can select the Exude option. After using a digital caliper to measure the thickness of the record, I found it to be around .8 inches, and so I extruded my drawing .8".
Then I change into CAM and selected 2D Contour, since all I need is for the machine to do is cut the shape of the dragon crest out. I go under tool orientation and select my z axis by finding some corner edge on my model. The tool I have selected should be the same tool as my other projects.
Then, under geometry I can select each individual "chain," which is just selecting the bottom most path. This ensure that the machine cuts all the way through the record.
Here are all of the selected chains...
Now I can run the simulation to make sure everything is cut out properly... then I posted my gcode and saved it to a flash drive.
Vinyl Cutting Clock Marks
Since other people were using the CNC Router we decided to vinyl cut the lines of the clock. For this we both used the traced lines from Jill's image trace and saved to another document. ( Here is the link to her site to see her projects progress).
Routing Records
If you're reading this, I'm going to be honest. We tried cutting this record out so many times, changing little things about our Fusion files, screwing things down, trying different adhesives, cracking records, bending drill bits, that me and Jill made an executive decision not to give up, but just the stop the madness. We both had other classes and final exams to worry about, and sometimes you can only persevere so long before it turns into insanity. (Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and hoping for the same result). I'm going to be a teaching assistant for the lab next semester, so I might finish this project as a personal assignment, but e have both accepted that we are just going to have to turn in what we were able to do. There was an option for an extension, but the parameters of the guidelines weren't realistic for us (We both have clubs and classes that would request us for contact time and at this point we are probably going to get less than an 80% anyways) and we both didn't want to deal with the stress of this second semester. The site is updated to the best of our ability and whatever grade we get, won't truly drop our grade that much. Sorry.
Jill trying not to scream....
A whole mess...
But, anyways here is what we did up until now...
Installing Clock Parts
Here is a little snippet of us dissecting Jill's old clocks, but of course we never got to install them.
What I learned
I learned that vinyls, like many other kinds of music storage are now made out of plastic, which just adds to the amount of plastic we waste, but I also learned that you cannot cut PVC with a laser due tot he formation of chlorine gas. The laser probably would have made this project 10x easier and faster (and I might have actually finished it). I also learned ho to disassemble and reassemble a clock (they're actually pretty simple), a lot of thanks to Jill for helping me. Finally, the biggest and most exciting thing I learned was that I could extrude images in Fusion 360 MUCH faster and in a MUCH less convoluted way than in Inventor. I actually thing I now prefer Fusion 360 to Inventor. Most of all, I learned that sometimes... it's just not going to work. And that's okay.