Clean and seen

A final project for 24-672 DIY Design and Fabrication

Who, what, why, how?

This project was built for Nick, who is a black hole for pens and a forgetful person at the best of times. The project is a glow-in-the-dark desk organizer that holds pens, pencils, and a water bottle. Often times, Nick will put pens in his pockets or on his desk and forget about them, resulting in either stained clothes or lost everything. With this aesthetically pleasing desk organizer, I hope to remedy his problems and relieve my headaches.

To fabricate this project, I created the topography by tracing an elevation map into Solidworks splines, lasercut pieces of plywood, and then glued and pressed them all together. For the rest of the body, I created a bounding box lined with parchment paper, and then slowly filled it with the desired resin, eventually dipping acrylic inserts to create the spaces in the desk organizer.

Moodboard

Some small problems (and how i fixed them)

I really wanted to go for a sleek look with this project. Initially, I had planned on using a CNC router to obtain smooth curves, but unfortunately the shop hours and the demand made it difficult to get a time slot. Another problem I ran into was that nearly all of the data I found for topography was either, extremely detailed, or not detailed enough. I felt like Goldilocks, and I just could not find something that looked just right. Instead, I did it myself! I took a topographic map of Pittsburgh, imported it to Solidworks, and then manually traced the elevation lines using splines. I separated each level into a different dxf file and it worked fantastically!

My next issue was after all of the resin had cured. I found that it was near impossible to pull the acrylic inserts out no matter how much mold release I had sprayed. This is likely due to a lack of a draft angle (in hindsight, was my fault completely). I tried chiseling it out, heat gunning it out, and drilling it out. None of the methods seemed even close to being able to even somewhat easily remove the pieces. I finally ask the machine shop guys, and they were thankfully able to help me mill out the majority of the acrylic. The remaining pieces were easy enough to remove with some pliers. Next time, I'd like to try wrapping the pieces in latex, or making the inserts out of silicone.

Unfortunately, I underestimated how much the pigment would fog up the clear resin. It was pretty bearable up until the final pour. With that final pour, nearly all of the detailed landscape was gone! I think I am going to try this again without any pigment added at all!