It was another great week in the shop, a lot of work being done. We’ll get to that in just a moment, but we wanted to let you know there will be no blog posts during the upcoming break. We will begin blog posts again after the first week from returning to school. We hope everybody has an enjoyable and restful break, and a very happy New Year!
Now, on to the student work. This week Senior Milo Austin was making a custom coat hanger. He writes on his blog:
This week the coat hanger came to life. I started by periodically printing all the coat hooks two at a time. While the hooks were printing I went to the CNC router to start with the backing. Since the size of the coat hanger is relatively small it was a pretty quick cut; only about five minutes. I was very pleased with the cut and I am currently trying to flatten the wooden backing as the board I used was slightly warped. My plan is to soak the wood and clamp it to a flat surface over the weekend. I also am painting the coat hooks, so it will be a couple days before I assemble everything.
As previously mentioned the fish feeder is complete but in order to work it needs to be programed and all the electronics need to be attached. Luckily the electronics already exist they just needed to be mounted to the frame of the fish feeder. since I changed how the motor is mounted the electronics also mount differently now. To account for the new shape I just had to drill some larger holes in the electronics casing for it to fit.
See photos of Milo’s work on his website at this link.
With the holiday season in full swing, some students took time to make gifts for loved one. Junior Kim Dao is making a puzzle for her father.
This week, I decided to take a break from the Giant Word Clock. I wanted to make a gift for my Dad because his birthday is approaching. I believe that he will like this puzzle I came up for him that has a message for him. I made the pieces on fusion by importing a template as a canvas. I traced over for each piece with splines then after I was done I extruded each piece out by using offset planes. I was able to export each piece as a drawing so then I could use that to save it as a DXF file. After laser-cutting the puzzle pieces into cardboard, I decided to work on making letters and I simply inserted text onto each piece and was able to save it as a DXF file and edit it into Inkscape. After finalizing changes I cut everything out of wood, I reused the left over pieces from the wooden pieces from the Giant Word Clock to cut out my letters. My desk was a real puzzle I had to solve. I plan to stopping by a store nearby my house if they have any ribbon so then I could wrap it around the box after wrapping it with some left over Christmas wrapper. It works either way because his birthday is 4 days before Christmas. I plan to return to working on the Giant Word Clock as the shop has got new acrylic but I am unsure if we have gotten black acrylic.
See photos of Kim’s work on her website at this link.
The Sophomores continued their work on the LED Light Box Project. Most have created their custom circuits on a breadboard, and are now transferring their circuitry designs to CAD so they can begin cutting custom circuit boards. They are doing a great job on this first project!
See you all again in the New Year!
MVTHS Engineering 
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