Day 6 - April 29th 2009

Today we worked extremely hard and diligently on what we thought was a lot of work. As much as we would love to say we got a lot of building done, after a few mistakes we feel we could have done more. Emily measured the roof and Alexa proceeded to cut out the shapes. Emily made the outlines of the characters as well as the front door, everything was going smoothly until we realized the following that we had not included in our sketches:

§  Problem: We needed another piece of wood to hold the followers in place so they wouldn't fall off the track of the cam. 

   Solution: We have cut out two pieces of wood (35 x 10) that will be glued in place between the axle and the character on the end of the follower to hold it in place. 

§   Problem: We realized it is almost impossible to cut squares (which we need for the windows and the doors) in the middle of a piece of wood. 

   Solution: We will use the drill press to put the largest size hole possible in three locations to use as make-shift circular windows, and we shouldn't have a problem cutting out the door as we can start the hole from the bottom of the wood rather than the middle.

§   Problem:  We didn't write the correct measurements for the width of the two rectangular pieces for the roof, so we are missing about 5 cm in total on the top of the roof.

    Solution: We have yet to solve this issue yet, but Alexa plans on re-cutting two new 19.5 x 35 cm slabs of wood for the roof.

Today we also used almost every power tool in the tech lab! So we definitely learnt a lot about cutting straight lines, and measuring twice and cutting once.

Emily & Alexa

Day 5 - April 24th 2009

Today we were hoping to do more than last time, and we feel very accomplished! Not only did we cut out everything we had hoped to, we also have the splinters to prove it. Because the pieces of our house were too big for any of the electric saws, unfortunately we had to do everything by hand. As hard as it was, we did learn a lot. Such as, clamps don't work as well as people for holding wood down while you're trying to saw it. 

We cut out the four sides of our house out and we hope that next time we will be able to draw the roof lines and cut out all four pieces (two triangles and two rectangles). 

Emily & Alexa

Day 4 - April 16th 2009

our isometric drawing

our orthographic drawing

Today we handed in both of our technical drawings, and we began building. We pretty much spent our whole class measuring. We didn't encounter any problems besides the fact that we found it nearly impossible to draw a straight line. We tried to focus on the main pieces of the house, yet we couldn't even seem to finish those.

Hopefully next time we will be able to catch up on lost time!

Alexa & Emily

Day 3 - April 6th 2009

Today we handed in our conceptual sketch, we also started drawing our technical drawings by hand. Alexa is drawing the orthographic layout and Emily is drawing the isometric drawing. We realized as we were trying to configure the layout of the machines that the crank was positioned way to high. We had originally planned gears between the crank and the axle to initialize the rotations, but we decided that it would be much easier to just attach the crank directly to the axle and cut out a whole step in between. For homework, Alexa will finish her drawing, and Emily will finish hers as well. 

While doing some reaseach and the technical drawings, we figured out the perfect way to make the characters come all the way into sight through the windows then drop completely out of the picture was to use a "snail drop" cam. (http://www.technologystudent.com/cams/snail1.htm)