Watching my designs come to life from CAD. The tooling I work on has hundreds upon hundreds of parts. I have had bills of materials that are 60 pages long. We have our own CNC machines, and an enormous industrial 3D printer. So, I get to watch my parts grow, and be released from blocks of raw aluminum. Then, slowly over the course of a month, the parts gradually come together to something resembling a machine. When air and power get plugged in for the first time and it comes to life? Magic every time. Those first parts are like newborns to me. Even if they are scrap/ugly. When they finally get tuned in to produce good parts every time, I’m always giddy. I made this. This is my baby.
I think the craziest tool I have had to design was roughly 2.5 x 1.5 x 1 meter. It made one part at a time. It had 25 “edgefolding” units, 7 slides, retractable skin pins, a retractable skin clamp, suction cups, grippers, two-stage vacuum for the skin, and three forms of heat. Hot air, hot water, and a big IR shuttle that came in and heated both the upper and lower tool and had to retract and close in 2 seconds.
Watching my designs come to life from CAD. The tooling I work on has hundreds upon hundreds of parts. I have had bills of materials that are 60 pages long. We have our own CNC machines, and an enormous industrial 3D printer. So, I get to watch my parts grow, and be released from blocks of raw aluminum. Then, slowly over the course of a month, the parts gradually come together to something resembling a machine. When air and power get plugged in for the first time and it comes to life? Magic every time. Those first parts are like newborns to me. Even if they are scrap/ugly. When they finally get tuned in to produce good parts every time, I’m always giddy. I made this. This is my baby.
I think the craziest tool I have had to design was roughly 2.5 x 1.5 x 1 meter. It made one part at a time. It had 25 “edgefolding” units, 7 slides, retractable skin pins, a retractable skin clamp, suction cups, grippers, two-stage vacuum for the skin, and three forms of heat. Hot air, hot water, and a big IR shuttle that came in and heated both the upper and lower tool and had to retract and close in 2 seconds.