petesmedia

Moved the majority of my stuff into my new room. Had to shuffle a few things around but got my bed and desk setup with the help of Noor. So much nicer than the room I had last year.

To become a Design & Technology teacher, I need to have some skills in woodwork/metalwork. I’m doing an introductory to workshop course and our first project it to create chocolate moulds. I’ve decided to create a mould that resembles a model train.

The Chocolate Train Portfolio – 2mb PDF

The basic assembly of pieces to identify possible problems that may arise.

Showing the detail of the spoked wheels that were obtained by cutting 3mm MDF with the laser cutter.

Now onto the photos of the build…

(continue reading…)

So we started off with a CAD file, this one is made in Graphite.

Then we used a laser cutter to cut it out onto 3mm MDF.

Showing the pieces cut from the laser cutter and the final product after turning.

That’s not me in the pic but it’s pretty much the same object that I turned on the lathe today. Here’s a few things I learn’t that hopefully I won’t forget by writing them down.

1. Cut diagonals into the end of the job to identify the centre point and give the spindle something to bite into.
2. Mount into lathe.
3. Adjust tool rest so it sits slightly above the centre.
4. Adjust lathe speed.

• Slow Speed – Used for balancing and larger jobs.
• Fast Speed – Used for small jobs.

Technique is all about finding the right cutting angle as it varies between tools.

Sanding / Finishing

We worked our way down from 80 grit to 400 grit sandpaper then polished with the saw dust we created.

The final product.

So today I went to class as a 2nd year uni student. I walked in, sat down and logged on to an iMac desktop computer. It didn’t take long to realise that the good old Mighty Mouse didn’t have right click. That’s okay, only a slight annoyance, I know how to work a MAC holding control every time you want to right click. Anyway, the teacher is trying to download Quicktime Pro on her laptop and doesn’t realise that the projector is already on and that Quicktime Pro is a paid program so no matter how many times she googles for “Quicktime Pro download mac osx” there’s a good chance that the uni has blocked all crack/warez sites.

This gives me an indication of what to expect… not a great deal, but that’s okay. It’s the first tutorial so everyone has to get familiar with the MACs and stuff. She explains that in todays lesson we’ll capture an image and apply an effect using Photo Booth. Then we’ll add some text using Photoshop and finally import the image into a html file. Luckily tutorials allow for two hours to complete this task.

Now I have to admit that using Photo Booth was impressive, there are multiple effects that you can easily apply to your image which is taken from the inbuilt web camera inside the mac. I was also impressed with the quality of the camera. It was outputting a fairly crisp 640×480 image. Photo Booth can also record video with effects. So within a few clicks I had saved various images with the built in effects.

Then we moved onto Photoshop. We were shown the clone tool, healing brush and the inbuilt filter gallery. Advised to add some text and change the colours around. Then we had a lecture on saving files. I can’t believe people still don’t understand where to save their files to… Like hasn’t everyone else in this class used a computer before? Next we move onto Dreamweaver.

If you’ve ever used Microsoft Word, than the basics of Dreamweaver aren’t that hard to grasp. Basically you can type text, change colours and insert images. OMG wow! So my stuff is arranged all messy, how do I organise it? We were taught to insert a TABLE and make things fit inside the rows and columns. FFS tables were out of fashion when I was doing TAFE 4 years ago. Why don’t these courses just teach what is now a standard in the web design industry from the start? Yes, I’m talking about CSS.

So after all that I ended up with this awesome website which made me feel like I was in primary school again.