Module 3 - Fabrication

Luke Dempsey (638407)Due: 5/14/2013

~ lantern inspired by the pattern of coral ~

Interesting patterns can be found everywhere in nature,the chosen natural pattern to be the inspiration for this lantern is coral. The coral has strong primitive patterns that give the lantern a bold, jagged and strong feeling.

Background

pattern can be emulated given nearly any set of points.

could be analysed

base shape for the form

The original design was literally !ipped on its head so that the best feature, the original bottom, was put on display. Instead of the lamp wrapping around the arm which would have made a sketchy "nal product, the lantern is now held by a string that runs straight through the middle of the top showcasing the simplicity and boldness of the panelling in that area.

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Consequently, this inversion of the original design makes the lantern look stronger and bolder than previously - re!ecting the hardy nature of the coral that inspired it.

The panels were unrolled and tabs were applied so that they -

countered during this process was the Grasshopper "le messing up the tabs so most of them had to be drawn in manually.

73%, this has been calculated by measuring the area of one panel and then multiplying by how many similarly-shaped panels there are.

The card cutter was used to cut out the panels, the card cutter

One of the sheets of paper was stored in a tube, when it was taped onto the card cutter bed, it was still a little bit raised. Occasionally the card cutter would catch on these raised bits and rip the paper.

they were folded according to the 3D digital design and then glued together.

The glueing technique took some time to perfect, this is evident in the early prototypes in that there was lots of resi-due on the model. To cleanly glue the panels together, it

squeezed onto a sheet of paper and then applied thinly to the tab of the pane with a credit card.

It was found that clips were the best way to hold the tabs

with a cloth, never "ngers as it was found that it just made the residue more dirty.

The card cutter automatically cut out the unrolled panels

It was found that clips were very useful when gluing

Glue residue was quite a big problem

Construction Process

To light the lamp, a homemade circuit was made by soldering LED lights to a battery pack with switch. In a previous module, it was discussed that

-not be directly seen through the lantern. To combat this and make the

placed in that.

Originally the baking paper was cut into strips and glued onto two ivory card rings on each end. This was overly complicated, the LED lights were still sometimes visible from the outside, and also it couldn’t support itselft under its own weight. The less-is-more approach was then taken with the baking paper rolled up and then placed in the lantern. The re-

Final Lantern with lighting. Note the pattern that the fold lines create

materials; the following are some of the most used/e#cient. Two-dimensional fabrication is the process of cutting a shape out of a 2D material with a certain thickness. This is mostly done by laser cutting, where it melts through the material, or water jet cutting – where a high-pressure water and abra-

and denser materials and the laser cutter often leaves scorch marks on the panels that are cut out.

out with a big block of the material and the form is ‘sculpted’ out of the block, CNC machines usually perform this process.

that the cutting tool can cut ‘under’ the form.

concept is that the printer ‘prints’ 2D cross-sections (with a thickness) on top of each other so that those cross sections

gradually build up and create a 3D form, similar to a CT scan but in reverse.

Formative fabrication is when raw materials are shaped into their designs, such as the bending of steel beams or wooden planks, giving curves to generally linear forms. These curves can be as-sembled together to create a general 3D form.

In this particular project a 2D fabrication process called card-cutting was used. In this process, a sheet of card is placed on a !at

and linetypes which aids folding processes of the card. Disadvan-tages of this process are that the knife can go blunt and therefore the cut won’t go entirely through and also that the paper can come unstable from the bed and can move around while cutting –

of the sheet of card, they can come loose – to counteract this lines have to be deleted in the computer drawing and then cut manu-ally later.

computer programs were just being used as another medium to record and represent the idea of the structure. It was not until

buildings can be designed using computer-generated processes and then translated into real-world materials. This has revolu-

The iterative design is the basis for many buildings – that have been modelled very similarly to my lantern. Basically, designing this lantern is like modelling a small-scale building or installation. It is assumed that because of this, the problems I encountered would have also have been encountered by architects/builders – just scaled up (such as faces not fully triangulating)

the thickness of the card that was used to construct the "nal model. This is best illustrated at the top of the model where all of the panels are supposed to all meet at one point in the middle of the form, where instead the thickness of the card at the fold lines meant that there was a circular hole (illustrated). Ben Gilbert, the sculptor in the Week 7 lecture who used rhino to model a giant turtle shell among other things, also encountered this. He had to modify his panels after they were laser cut so that they integrat-ed properly with the others and the sculpture could be complete without !aws.

qualities that the building material has that will very rarely be