Project One Conclusion

    The end of this project had a few obstacles and hiccups. For one, the sheets of plywood were actually only about 23 and a half inches long instead of 24 inches, forcing me to scale down my full drawings by a factor of about 1/50th last minute. Unfortunately, I didn't have the time to scale my drawings without scaling the dowel holes, and so they all ended up too small for my dowels to fit. To compensate, bored the dowel holes with drill bits of the right size.


    I also really underestimated the how wide the cuts from the laser would be, so much pieces didn't line up as precisely as I had hoped.





    Another factor I had considered was the amount of friction there would be between my moving part, which meant that I had to compromise on some of my moving parts in order for the iris mechanism to work. I tried to wipe the parts with candle wax to lubricate the parts, but it wasn't enough. If I had known that the friction would be such a problem, I would have spaced the layers apart a little.

    On a positive note, the staining process worked out really well, and the copper sulphate solution turned out far more vibrant than I expected, which I'm really happy about. The purple gouache stain turned out lovely as well, making the front of the piece turn an almost pink colour.



    Given more time, I would have refined and iterated the design further, and done more testing and experimentation, but despite the technical difficulties, I'm happy with the outcome and what I've accomplished. 

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