Week 2: Lamp production
In this week's lesson we were assigned to design our acrylic for our lamps. The acrylic would hopefully cover our lamps with designs related to our theme. My theme is Memphis design which is distinctive and uses bright colours and irregular shapes. My design consists of a multi- coloured robot with Memphis design and my name (Bal Rai) engraved with a laser cutter with a lightning bolt on the other side.
Tools
The software we were using was Design Techsoft 2D, basically CAD computer aided design which you would then send to the laser cutter CAM computer aided manufacturer. The tool we were mostly using was a rectangular shape. Using this tool we would then draw our acrylic desired shape with a width of 140mm and a height of 160mm. To know what the measurements when drawing the box we had to look at the tab at the bottom. This was labelled 'rel any' , we were then able to draw our box. To help us draw our rectangle, we used a tool called Grid lock. With this tool, this would use a grid to draw the rectangle, rather than using unproportioned lines. To make our designs we could use line drawings which could be found in the Shared Drive, D&T RMC, and then line drawings. If this wasn't good enough we could search line drawings of our desired type and add them to our acrylic.

Lamp Production

Week 2
We were set a homework to create a production plan. This was beneficial because this was our plan to create our lamp. In this week's lesson, we were assigned to mark out our wood for the dowel joints to join together. We had a choice, in changing the size of the wood therefore you would have to mark out your desired measurements and use a tenon saw to cut.

Step 1. Firstly we had to write our names on our pieces of wood, so we could know which pieces of wood were ours.
Step 2. Secondly we lined up our wood into the frame for the lamp. On the outside of the rails for the frame we marked a little '6' to signify the outside of the wood.
Step 3. After we lined up our wood we matched our wooden frame joints corner to corner because this would enable us to know which pieces of wood will join together to make the wooden frame for our lamp.
Diagram: My sketch of Step 3.

Step 4. We then marked out accurate diagonal crosses on our wooden rails. This would shows us where to drill the dowel joint.

Step 5. I then put a single rail on my three tall pieces of wood and placed the rail accurately in the middle measuring with the ruler the middle of my wood pieces. After placing my rail on the middle of my wood pieces, I then marked the outskirts of the rail onto the wood. This would help show where to join the wooden pieces when using dowel joints to join the frame for our lamp.

 

Inspiration: Memphis Design By Balwant Rai
Memphis Design has inspired me to create some amazing Memphis designs.
Here are a few inspired pictures: