Week 5/12 - 5/16

This week I was working on a little delayed mothers day gift. The idea was to make some flowers out of wood and to engrave some sort of message onto the flowers. I first began with the model which used a ton of splines which I actually managed to constrain in the sketches. Once I finished the model I was ready to begin the test cuts but I forgot that inkscape is weird with splines. First I tried downloading this addon from the autodesk website for fusion 360 which converted splines to polylines which would theoretically allow the splines to show up in inkscape but that didn't work so then I did the method where I turned it into drawings and it worked fine.

Once I got all the vectors into inkscape I got it all cut out with cardboard for the test cut and it actually came out fine. There was no necessary changes I needed to make but I did get an idea from when I would cut it out of wood. I cut out an additional circle which I would then glue onto the center of the flower to give it a raised center point.

I cut it out of wood directly after because the cardboard didn't need any changes and assembling it out of wood was slightly trickier because the wood didn't have friction like the the cardboard did to keep it together. But I got it assembled and it was then ready for me to glue it together.

After gluing the bottom of it together I spent the rest of the next day just sanding. The wood did not look good it had a lot of burn marks and other blemishes so I sanded and sanded and got them to mostly go away.

After sanding I went up to carpentry to borrow some wood finish from them because we haven't had any in shop for a while. The wood finish was the exact color I was looking for and it looked really good on the flowers and the base when I applied it.