Progress I - Started Making Shapes But the Shapes Fought Back

 

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After some introspection and critical thinking I ended up choosing the pen for this project - it was the most reasonable to do with the amount of time given for the project, and so far I've found it provides enough of a challenge. While I did spend a lot of time on what I have so far, I definitely feel as though I didn't get as far as I would have liked - mostly from running into problems that I managed to solve after way too much time. However, I still think I managed to get some decent work done so lets take a look!

What was working:

By far the easiest parts so far have been the spring thanks to the demo we did in class, and the pen grip as by that point I was really getting into the groove of things. Each time I started a new piece, I made sure to take note of every section that would need to be measured and then take down the numbers for it:

After that I got to work on the spring; I used what I remembered from the demo we did in class and tried to follow it as best as I could, and didn't really run into any problems.

closeup rendered view of the spring

shaded view of the spring and metal cover

The metal cover took a little longer to figure out as I wasn't sure how to have the curve the same as the actual thing; I figured this out by measuring the widest point on the cover and using that as a point within the arc/curve. The threads weren't too difficult either, as I also used the demo we did for that.

The pen tip/plastic tube were also fairly easy, although I did run into a couple problems that I'll talk about in the next section.

The easiest part by far has been the pen grip - it was essentially the same as the metal cover, but with an added lip on the bottom that sets it into the body of the pen. I also took the liberty of adding materials to all of the pieces so far, just to see how they would look; for this one I used a plastic material that I turned down the opacity and reflectiveness of (the grip is semi-opaque). I still might do some tweaking but for a test I think it looks pretty good!

What wasn't working:

This thing. The spring holder thing. Realistically it shouldn't have been that hard? It's just a couple of semicircles and either an arc or some sort of fillet/blend, but it took me a ridiculous amount of time to do it and I'm entirely convinced I did it wrong. I eventually did it by finding the radius of the curve and creating an arc that I revolved around the entire thing, which is definitely a solution, though probably not the right one. I haven't cried over this project yet but I came pretty close with this part! 😀

Extra

While there isn't much to put together yet, I still quickly tried anyways just to make sure everything was fitting and it looks pretty good so far!

Overall I'm pretty proud of how this is turning out so far and I'm excited to keep working on it! I also just got my pattern laser cut so look out for that post sometime this week :)

- Forrest