Making templates to make things from

Having arrived at a design for the Where the Sky Widens pods, I’ve been developing it into a template form from which workshop participants can assemble their own pods.

I went back to the 3D design software and re-worked the layout of the parts to try and minimise some awkward and fragile sections. There are lots of steps and software jumps in this, so I had to laser cut the results and assemble them again to check that everything was as it should be.

It wasn’t quite, but those details were easy to fix. (I think they’re fixed, anyway!)

One thing that worked really well was the dumb-bells. I want to transport the templates still attached to the A1 sheet of paper they’re cut into. This means we’ll have to finish cutting out parts of the outlines at the workshops and the dumb-bells make getting scissors right up to the cut line a lot easier.

I also experimented with engraving the assembly instructions onto the same sheets, but this made the cut time waaay tooooo loooooong (time == money and I’ll be lasering a lot of these things!)

Twitter has declared the pods also look like tribolites. It’s not wrong.