(STEM to STEAM) 3D Design and Fabrication Club!

Hey there!  It’s been too long since I last posted but I wanted to update you on some exciting news going on at my school.  My Art Teacher friend (Louie Aragon) and I have finally gotten around to cleaning out a space for a new 3D Design and Fabrication Club.  We have been working with a few students (Anthony Villarreal and Brandon Sebastian) to pilot the club, and for one of our first projects, we used Autodesk 123D Design to create a solid model and Autodesk 123D Make to slice the model into a set of interlocking parts that we planned to cut out using our ShopBot Desktop.

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Since Louie’s students are very art-focused, we decided to start out by creating an abstract shape that we could possibly turn into a light fixture…or something.

All in all, the process of toolpathing and cutting out our pieces went well but we discovered early in the process that the 2-foot x 4-foot x 1/4″ wood project panels we purchased from Home Depot were actually only 0.200″ thick!

This led to an unfortunate incident when our ShopBot cut through the tabs holding our part in place since we set Z = 0 to the top of the surface of the panel…

Fortunately, the good folks at ShopBot have designed and built a really robust machine and the only real damage done was to our egos…

After re-zeroing the machine and adjusting our tool paths to account for the actual thickness of the wood, we were able to get all of our pieces cut and assembled without much additional drama.

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We discovered that our sculpture works well as a bottle rack!

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Looks pretty good turned 90° also…

We’re looking forward to sharing more of our projects with you in the future.  Let us know if you have any questions or comments!

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