Wow, This Month.

Wow, this month.

Sorry for the radio silence this month, Internet. Between a huge pile of stuff to do at work plus a family wedding plus obligations to friends plus two craft fairs, I had basically no brainpower left to deal with commissions or updates.

To help me deal with the stress, though, I did make a large thing just for myself. (Well, it was also related to the big friends obligation.) I made an aluminum and rubber ring shirt in European 4-in-1. It's been at least a year or two since I made something large like that just for myself, and I'm really happy that I made it. Photos will be uploaded once I have a chance to take them.

Anyway, my obligations are back down to a manageable level now, so I'll be picking things up again and starting back up on commissions, and on the backlog of correspondence that's piled up.

I went out with a friend and got some photos of a bunch of the leather bracelets that I'd neglected getting photos of for a while! I won't link to these individually, but all these designs are up on my Etsy shop.

Chandelier Saga Part 2: CAD

Picking up the story of making this giant lamp, we get to the hardest, most important part, but also the least photogenic. That would be, the computer modeling and prototyping.

Here's what I was going for in terms of structure:

The scales are made of 1/16" thick plywood, linked to their neighbors by bolts. The struts spanning the widths of the scales are there to pull the ends together and make sure the centers bend upwards to let enough light through.

It turned out to take something like 4 full rebuilds of the computer model before I was happy with it. The root of the problem is related to the fact that it's really hard to model how real-life materials will bend. So every few days for a couple weeks I had to re-draw all the geometry with slight differences, head in to the laser shop to cut the pieces out, and assemble them to see what it would look like.

Hit the jump for a bunch of screen shots of the different steps involved in designing the final piece.

Working in Rhino (my 3D Computer Aided Design software of choice/training/convenience), I started with an ideal originator surface, created by revolving a curve. I dropped grid points along it:

Then I drew out the base shape for the scales with points and lines. The tips of the scales are drawn out in space perpendicular to the grid point they're above. Their distance from the surface is proportional to the width of that scale:

Next, turning that into surfaces and mirroring the scales along their center-line. (Also, there were some steps involved in expanding the edges of the scales to accommodate the bolts.)

Next comes a polar array to get them all in place:

And a cut-away view to show the internal structure that would hold the light bulbs in place:

But then (after testing the floppiness of the previous prototype) I decided I should give it a bit more structure to support certain points of the surface. Figuring out the geometry for that was a pain:

With that done, time to flatten the scales:

...and lay out the sheets that I would be laser-cutting:

Then I just have to cut twelve copies of each of these sheets, plus a half dozen or so more sheets for the internal structure.

And that mostly wraps it up for the CAD part of this story. I'm intentionally glossing over a lot of the geometry headaches, because you don't want to think about it. Trust me.

Next up will be photos of construction! Though I foolishly forgot to take any photos of actually laser-cutting the scales.

I'll leave you with the front view of that prototype I showed at the beginning:

Just a quick photo of a horned mask that someone ordered. The copy of this design that I had photos of up on my Etsy page was black with silver horns, but this person asked for red with black horns, apparently to match the colors of the red bull in The Last Unicorn. I haven't seen the movie before, but maybe it'll go on my list of things to watch while linking chainmail together.

Entertainingly (for me at least), daylight savings time meant that by the time I got home on the evening when I needed to ship it out, it was already dark. So this photo was under a street light with a full second exposure on a tripod. It turned out pretty OK.

This dragon tail is made of standard aluminum scales, with a blue anodized aluminum underbelly. It's my standard length of 35 inches long, and that's mostly it. Classic and simple. But at the request of the commissioner, it does have an engraving on the scales on the underside, right below the belt loops where it's attached. (The tail was commissioned as a gift.)

And I guess as an added bonus, the photo with the engraving gives a good shot of the belt loop attachments. There are two straps (made of stainless steel in a European 6-in-1 pattern) that your belt threads through, and if you want to make sure the tail stays well in place when you're wearing it, in between the two loops on the tail you can also thread the belt through the belt loop in the center of the back of your pants.

If you like these tails I make, how about checking out this page with information about them? http://armoreddragon.tumblr.com/tails (My commission queue is currently kind of deep, though. I'm working as fast as I can.)

Here's a quick photo of this dragon tail commission I just knocked out. It's done in anodized aluminum, primarily black with a purple underbelly.

I just finished the scale shirt I was slogging away on for a long time, and was feeling like I hadn't finished very many things for too long of a time, and was antsy. So I pounded this out in a day and a half.

Tomorrow I'll take some nice photos of it being worn outside in some natural light, but today it was rainy.

If you're curious about these, check out my tail commissioning guide!