Week Three - Assembly Required
22 November 2019
The third week has come and gone, and we’ve made some decent progress! Tuesday we bought our plywood at The Home Depot, as well as picked up some screws and spacers. They didn’t have the exact thickness plywood we needed, but we adjusted our plans for the laser cutter and all was well. On Wednesday we honored our appointment and went down to Mount Holyoke to cut our pieces, though we ran into quite a few problems!
When we exported our plans and opened them in Adobe Illustrator in order to print them, we found that the laser cutter would only engrave the lines, instead of cutting them. After much trial and error, one of the assistants told us that our best bet was to have AI trace over a .png of our plans, which resulted in quite a bit of funky geometry. We still left with parts after about 2 and a half hours, and we’ll make-do with what we have, but we certainly took a hit to both morale (and time).