Asa Forman
Mr. Grisbee
J-Term: Advanced 2D and 3D
Design
14 January 2018
U1P3D2A1T1E1
At the beginning of this
course, we were given a simple set of instructions.
- Each student must have two
projects.
- One must be done on the laser
cutter, and the other on the Computer Numerical Control (CNC) Router.
- At least one must be a
"3D" project, whether cut out as 3D, or assembled from a 2D design
to be a 3D object.
- 4.
One must solve a problem or be functional
- 5.
If doing all of this does not take you the full 3 weeks, then the
expectation is that you begin work on a different project. You are
expected to work on a project for the full length of the term.
- Have a good time following the instructions above.
For my 2D
project, I decided to construct a scrabble board; for my 3D project, I decided
to create a backgammon board. In this first week, I began, and almost
completed, all of the components to my scrabble board.
The actual board itself is comprised of ½ inch plywood complete
with a gray stain. The rasters on the board include a 15”x 15” table split into
1” boxes with the corresponding x2, or x3, word, or letter, multipliers, the
word “scrabble,” as well as the untrue letter distribution table
(unfortunately, I accidentally added an extra k). The pieces were made
from a ⅛ inch walnut board. Each piece has a letter along with it’s correlating
point value etched into the bottom right corner as one might find on typical
Scrabble pieces. While designing and constructing the board, I ran into various
problems.
The first problem I encountered when making both the board and the pieces was the inability to keep the same font I was designing my board
and my letters in on the 2018 version of Adobe Illustrator as the 2017 version,
on the computer that is used to print on the laser cutter, did not have it.
Fortunately, although unknown to me at the time, there is a tool on illustrator
that allows one to vectorize the selected text, and, more generally, any
selected, non vectorized raster. Thus, upon vectorizing all of the lettering on
my board and pieces, the computer, absent of the font I selected, didn’t read
my letters as a text, rather is read each individual letter as a vector. The
other most frequent problem I ran into, however, was, and still is, forgetting
to adjust the bed to the proper height per each material. My inability to
recognize that the bed had not been adjusted to the correct height resulted in
several burnt pieces of wood, a board that had to be cut on the table saw, as
well as numerous pieces not being cut as cleanly as they should have been cut.
Eventually, I overcame these difficulties and now have something of a final product.
While glancing over the final product, board and pieces abreast, I
noticed that it would be quite difficult, albeit possible, for the players
sitting both adjacent to and opposite the player facing the board accordingly
to both view and play their words. Thus, I decided to attach a lazy susan to
the board. With the addition of a lazy susan on the backside of the board,
players will be able to conveniently spin the board towards themselves allowing
each player to view the board properly on their turn.
Below are a couple
photographs of the board and the pieces:
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