learning the ropes

Today I worked on fabricating another two pulleys out of wood. I finished drilling well-aligned shaft holes in the side pieces and made new pulleys out of particleboard and plywood. The most time-consuming part of this process was cutting the circles out of with the bandsaw. I remembered that there is a jig for cutting circles, but didn’t want to spend time figuring out how to construct it in order to cut six circles. I first started by cutting around the contour of the circle, but ended up just making tangent cuts and then sanding away the excess. I was really trying to have another pulley finished by Saturday so I could test two of them with Wendy and Martha, but that doesn’t seem to be realistic at this point. I still have to make the encoder structure.

The completed wooden pulleys:

I constructed another P2/2 Connector Breakout Board so I can attach another pulley to my performance system. This time, I’ve annotated the photos in Flickr so the next time I construct one of these I don’t have to think how to build it again.

It felt very good to spend much of the day in the shop working with my hands. Much of the week, however, was spent struggling with how to make progress on the materials/form of the rope&pulley and also struggling with what I am producing.

Earlier in the week, I was researching materials. There are two directions I am considering: natural wood (mahogany, maple, walnut, cherry, etc) or recycled parts. The natural wood direction comes from my appreciation for naturally finished wooden instruments: electric and acoustic guitars, pianos, etc. The recycled direction relates more closely with one of the themes of the project which is, in a way, the recycling of musical content and the loop-based music metaphor.

When I got stuck researching, I tried to work a bit with the form. I started with raw sketches and then tried to work material in Google Sketchup.

I spent too much time trying to manipulate the materials in Sketchup, though, and became frustrated. A breakthrough occurred when I realized that I could use foam to quickly work through ideas. My previous prototype was cardboard, which is durable, but not easy to work with quickly.

Pretty in Pink: A photo essay about my process today. Click on the individual pictures for notes.

I made three new prototype shapes today and I’m looking for feedback on them.