For the final project, me and my partner were tasked with creating a device that either was made up of recycled parts or something that recycles other items. The brainstorming portion of the project took much longer than we had planned. At first, my partner and I were set on doing a machine that would crush cans, but we saw that there were a few factors that would make it unreliable, and we also questioned the durability of the parts if we 3D printed them. Instead, we found a different design concept. This is when we settled on the water bottle strip maker, which would take plastic bottles and turn them into reusable and durable plastic cordage.
Our revolved around a mounted razor blade that would slice through the water bottle as it was pulled through the device. The mounted razor blade was then stationed on a wood plank that acted as the base to our device, and held all the parts together. For the project, we would have to use the CNC router to carve out our base, the 3D printer to create the mount for our razor blade, and the laser engraver in order to cut out two pieces of acrylic to hold the razor blade in place.
The first step in the creation of our project was designing. We started working on this part in Inventor, because it would allow us to make all the parts separately and bring them all together in an assembly. The dimensions of our project were something that were always changing. My partner and I would run into a design flaw and we would have to fix it, and that would also change the entirety of the project. After a lot of work though, we finally ended up with a design with working dimensions.
The first part of our project we decided to make was the base. This required us to take our design from Inventor and put it into Fusion 360. The cutting we needed from the CNC Router was not very complicated at all, so the setup of the tool path and other steps in Fusion 360 were much simpler than the last time we used it. A few of the settings were also different, because this time we were using wood as our material instead of tool foam, but with the help of an instructor it was very easy to set up and complete our base, which turned out exactly how we wanted it.
The next part we decided to do were the two mounts that would hold our razor blade in place. For this we had to export our mounts created in Inventor to the Maker bot software. With my prior experience along with the simplicity of the software, I was able to correctly set up both of the mounts to print at the same time. There wasn't much left to do after that, so my partner and I saved the Maker bot set up onto a flash drive, plugged it into a 3D printer, and followed the on screen prompts until the machine started. Our first attempt at the mounts did not turn out well, because we had messed up a dimension so the parts were too big to fit in the base. But our second attempt turned out perfectly, and fit into the base.
The final part of our project was the small acrylic pieces that would hold down our razor blade. Although these two pieces were small, the were the source of a lot of trouble. We constantly had to change the size and dimensions of these pieces as our design was altered. The main issue with this was the Illustrator software, which is what we made the pieces in so we could cut them out with the laser. Neither me or my partner were very good at using Illustrator, so these constant changes created issues at times. But once we finally had the pieces completed in Illustrator, the step of putting them onto a flash drive and going down to set it up on the laser was quite simple.
Once we had all the pieces created, our last step was to put them all together. The process was pretty simple. Using a combination of hot glue and wood glue, my partner and I were able to secure the two razor mounts to the base. We did the same thing to attach the razor blade to the mount, and to attach the acrylic pieces to both the razor and the mount.
Our project ended up looking just like we imagined it. There was nothing that really stood out as being different from our final design, even though we had to export and recreate the different parts in a variety of software. When testing our project, it was not too bad either. One issue we definitely did not think about was the sharpness of the razor blade. Our reused razor blade was quite dull, and it was a lot harder to cut through the plastic than anticipated. Besides that, our water bottle strip maker worked fine, and with a bit of sharpening of the razor, it could work a lot better.