3-D wood evaluation

What went successfully?

• The dragon design was made easy to manufacture, as the body and the wings were fashioned from one large length of plywood.
• Extra room was made for the hinges to work without catching by measuring out the dimensions so that one side of the hinge came out longer than the other.
• The sanding disk was successful when using it to curve out the edges of the wings. This created an aerodynamic aesthetic for the dragon model.
• The final model highly resembled the original maquette with very little differences, as the only design change made in the workshop was the inclusion of the extended dowel joint on the wing hinges.

What went unsuccessfully?

• Early ideas and designs of a dragons head were scrapped due to the complexity of the design featuring multiple pivot hinges for articulation. Due to time constraints and lack of expertise, the design was changed to a more simply dragon design that only featured to two joints and 2 hinges for simplicity.
• The plywood's physical properties was difficult to manipulate. Due to its compacted layer structure, the plywood would easily fracture and break off when drilling holes. This meant that some stages had to be repeated to get around this problem.
• The size of the design made it difficult to be able to sand edges down on the sand disk.This would have been avoided if the individual parts were sanded before assembling.

What could you have done Differently?

• Wider research into manipulating types of wood, as well as researching the physical properties of different types of wood before hand.
• As useful as plywood was, being easily cut, Pine or Beech could have been used as to avoid splintering and splitting when cutting or drilling.
• The Knuckle hinges and dowel joints were functional, however, they lacked any polish cosmetically. Therefore in future, the measurements of the these pieces could have been more precise to avoid the large gapes that were left. The dowel joints were especially crude due to last minute adjustments, so better organisation of time can also be considered.

How will this impact your future projects?

• This rotation featured many alteration in ideas and even in materials and processes. Knowing when the original concept did not work was a step in the right direction. This is because it became an opportunity to progress my skills in 3-D wood design.

• The rotation made it clear that one should not shy away from going backwards in the design cycle to review certain problems. Future projects will feature more problem solving.