3lephant

 I've finished up the model of my elephant and sliced it, and also started putting together physical prototypes. 

He is so cute, I'm pretty happy with my final model. 

The first wood prototype I made wasn't scaled to the material thickness correctly when prepping it to be lasercut, so he turned out really wide. He looks more like an aardvark or something, honestly. 

My original method for having the ears made up of individual slices proved to not work (of which I do not have documentation of unfortunately) because some of the slices near the tips of the ear shapes were just way too small for the lasercutter to cut, let alone cut the tiny spacers that would go in between them. 

I decided to change the design so it would be made of one singular cut piece that would slat into the slices horizontally. Ideally. 

              

My second attempt at a physical prototype, I decided to use cardboard so that expensive material is not unnecessarily wasted again. This time, he looks almost entirely on-model, which means I have almost entirely eliminated my previous issue. The cardboard is a little thicker than the 3mm I measured my model around, which is why he still looks a little chunky, but overall I'm much happier with how he turned out. I also discovered some new issues to fix when redoing my spacer pieces, such as extraneous pieces I had engineered on my finisher pieces, where I didn't need any labels or spacers. Also, the corrugated cardboard was too weak to hold the tiny forms I needed it to that plywood will not have a problem with, hence why he can only sit. Overall, I'm pretty excited to work on the final iteration and see how he turns out.