Fabrication: Multiple of 5

Timmy Zhou
Timmy’s Thoughts
Published in
4 min readNov 9, 2021

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I knew I wanted to try out the drill press for this project, so I randomly searched google for “hallow cubes” until I found something I liked

I thought this was really cool — I’d have 5 cubes with thin edges and glue them to a backboard at this weird stacked angle.

I quickly realized that it’d be more complicated to try and create square holes than it would be to keep it circular. I was going for small cubes, so trying to make sides and putting them together was going to be unrealistic for how much time I had. Instead of just one opening, I decided to have an opening on each side.

It was time to test this out and see if it was feasible!

Spade bits generate a lot of force

I wanted to test out first if I could do 3/4" holes on a 1" cube. The first thing was to do a row of 5 holes on a scrap block to see how I would line things up and move the piece. Turns out there wasn’t a good answer to that, and it involved having to unclamp the big wooden clamp and make small adjustments to try to account for the squeeze provided by the clamp.

I realized after the first day that it may have just been easier to clamp a piece in the blue clamp if it were opened up all the way. (More on that later)

Unfortunately the first test run ended with some mistakes being realized. The first set of holes went fine, but I didn’t account for how much power the drill would generate with everything clamped in. The force caused my test block to split in half during the second set of holes.

Takeaways from day 1:

  • Space holes further apart
  • Use a smaller drill bit
  • Get a thicker block of wood

At the start of day 2, I had 3 more pieces of scrap to test out my takeaways from the previous day. Within 10 minutes I’d split all three pieces upon the drill bit touching the wood (oops)

I had a smaller bit, had thicker pieces, and tried clamping the wood horizontally in the blue clamp. Turns out the spade was just generating too much force. Everything went fine after I swapped it for the round bit type that was 3/8".

I didn’t want to risk having the block split again with the second set of holes, so I opted for a conservative 1/4" bit which worked pretty well. I think I could’ve probably gone just a bit thicker for aesthetic purposes.

Once the holes were drilled, I sanded them first, and then cut using the belt saw.

With everything cut, I tried finding a layout with the blocks but trying to put them in the original design plan at the start seemed pretty cheap. I noticed some copper wire in the yellow bins, and remembering the pieces that were shown in class, I thought it’d be cool to combine the wire and these blocks somehow.

Testing some compositions

Being very un-versed in the ways of copper wire, this was the best abstract thing I could think of:

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