More Reverse Engineering

I’m in the process of making a reverse engineered dove-tail joint. A dove-tail joint is a perpendicular joint between two pieces of wood – one piece has pins and the other has the tails. Based on the grain of the wood, one has to first cut the pins on one piece and then cut the tails on the other piece using the pins as a template. Like with the reverse engineered book end, I want to see if I can make the cutting of the tails more accurate and fast by scanning the pins on a flat-bed scanner (the image above) and cutting out tails that fit them exactly.

Unfortunately the CNC router bit was not long enough for the thickness of the wood, so I’ll have to make another dove-tail with thinner lumber.

Cyborg Artisan

The following extract from an article written in 1881(http://www.telephonecollecting.org/feeling.htm) about electricity examines the question of the outside and inside of the body to the boundary between body and mind itself:

Ritter discovered that a feeble current transmitted through the eyeball produces a sensation as of a bright flash of light by its sudden stimulation of the optic nerve. Dr. Hunter³ saw flashes of light when a piece of metal placed under the tongue was touched against another which touched the moist tissues of the eye. Volta and Ritter heard musical sounds when a current was passed through the ears. Humboldt⁴ found a sensation to be produced in the organs of smell when a current was passed from the nostril to the soft palate.

These early experiments give rise to the idea of the part human part electrical cyborg. If the electrical currents from everyday appliances of the contemporary world were to interface with the boundary between inside and outside, body and mind, what effect will it have on the relationship between an artisan and her/his tool?

The pictures below show this idea applied to a paper cutter and an aluminium cutting surface that produces a sensation of taste when the blade passes through the object being cut:

This is an attempt to bring more of the body – both the inside and the outside – into contact with the tool and therefore bring the tool also closer to the mind.

Importance of De-technologizing: Computer Problems – Again!

For the third time this semester my laptop decided to stop working. All I could “produce” this week were better pictures of the reverse engineered book end I made last week. But not having the computer to distract me I managed to read two books that have set me thinking a lot more…

Material Testing & CNC

Here’s a book end I designed and fabricated as a part of a workshop titled Creative Machining taught by Rab Gordon, Peter Schhmit and Prof. Bill Mitchell last week. I combined 3D laser scanning and CNC routing to create a template to friction fit a small branch into a piece of wood.

De-technologized Non-destructive Testing

Here’s a de-technologized device for the non-destructive testing of the Young’s modulus of a material. The device works by hitting the material to be tested with a screw swinging on a thread. The energy from the collision of the screw and the material is transfered to another screw on the opposite side of the material. The difference in the swing angles of the two screws can give you the coefficient of restitution of the material with respect to the screws. The coefficient of restitution is a function of the Young’s modulus of the two materials.

SourceMapping

I’ve decided to sourcemap the House for New Orleans exhibited at the Home Delivery exhibition at MoMA this summer (). I had worked on the house as a part of a class on digital fabrication taught by Prof. Larry Sass. This house is an example of a digitally fabricated, mass-customizable, friction fit, plywood construction system for post-disaster reconstruction. I wanted to compare this house to a vernacular dwelling of the Bharia tribals of Madhya Pradesh in central India based on earlier research work I had done on their architecture. Below is the 3D model of a typical Bharia house that was used for the source map calculations:

This house is made of locally available unprocessed timber, adobe and thatch. The reason for the sourcemap comparison between these two houses is that I want to find a way to integrate material sensing with digital fabrication to allow digital fabrication techniques to better cope with irregular and unprocessed materials.

Here are the sourcemap results:

MoMA New Orleans House

Bharia House