Reflection

Digital Making was the first real experience in working with sheet metal. With the limited practice in the first few weeks on the basic skills, the fuel tank exercise was extremely challenging but rewarding. I’ve learnt a lot of new skills that I could apply to my studies and work in Industrial Design.

Skills Learnt and Applications 

There are two main sets of skills learnt over the time of this course and the exercises, practical skills involving directly sheet metal and observational thinking skills about form in a broader context.  

Throughout this course, I was able to learn a variety of skills and tools such as stump shrinking, stretching by rolling on the English wheel and metal shaping with a female mould. I was also able to refine on existing skills like laser cutting, and CAD models. This course also gave me the opportunity to apply these skills and a combination of them to create the fuel tank, bowl, tray, torus and blister. I found each of these skills to be challenging and at times overwhelming, especially with the fuel tank when my basic sheet metal skills were still rough. 

There were A LOT of improvements that could have been made to fuel tank skin and I would definitely do it differently. 

 Improvement 1

Cutting the piece closer to the final size would have made my task a lot easier. The excess material just made it significantly harder. 

 

Improvement 2

Not using the english wheel first to get the curve. Rolling in either direction was not enough to get the right curvature. 

Improvement 3 

Not using stump shrinking near the beginning. This was address in my second attempt but it did not work as it caused too much curvature too soon

Improvement 4

Shrinking with the shrinker too aggressively / hammering out the marks too hard. Cause the metal to over work and caused a lot of tears 

Improvement 5

Trying to over compensate the last mistake with the shrinker / hammering with english wheel only caused further damage as it overworked the material too much / too thin 

Application 

With these skill learnt, I am about to visualise how a certain piece of metal object could have been made. Example of this was a recent custom PC front cover by JayzTwoCent youtube channel 

I was able to see how the front custom Bentley cover could have been made. I can see elements of a tray and the different shrinking that might have been used. Because of the skills I've learnt from this course, I was able to appreciate this a lot more than I would have otherwise.

I am also able to appreciate and understand different forms in different designs and the combinations of smaller shapes to achieve the overall form. Example of this was a recent Mazda concept car. I can appreciate some smaller shapes that I would have otherwise missed.

These skills I have learnt I could apply to my work in architecture as well as my studies in Industrial Design. I can see a lot of application to a current project at work at the corner of Copeland St/Castlereagh St in Liverpool to make the planned high rise to have more interesting forms/forms that follow the curvature of the road. (I'm not able to show the work at the moment but heres the location) 

I can also see these skills in understanding form and potentially sheet metal skills to be used my in final year design in Industrial Design to evoke different emotions to achieve my goals. 

Development Over Semester 

Comparing the first few week’s attempts to the final fuel tank skin, although I don’t think the quality of work has improved much, I think the complexity of the fuel tank skin demonstrated the variety of skills gained throughout this experience. 

 

First basic skills with the bowl, tray, torus and blister compared to the final fuel tank skin. 

Throughout the semester, I have learnt a lot of new skills. The basics of the first few weeks has been essential to the final exercise with the fuel tank. However, I don’t feel like I’ve had enough practice over the short 13 weeks to display a good amount of improvement to the quality of my work. Regardless I do look forward to refining my skills over time and practice at home / uni in the future. 

I wanted to attempt to make something unique and creative. So I tried different methods in different mallets to shrink/stretch the bowl as well as an /attempt/ at a hammer tone finish. I quickly realised this is much harder than I expected, and I lacked a lot of the skills required to start doing things differently.

I found the tray and the bowl at a difficulty that was challenging but manageable. However, I found the torus and blister to be extremely difficult. I was ok with the quality of work for the bowl and tray after a few attempts, however for the blister and torus it was quite disappointing. I was also limited by time and I could only have about 2-3 attempts at each of the skills.

The fuel tank exercise began with trying to figure out how to get the Rhino file to work. Eventually Figuring out that we needed grasshopper, and with some help from the other groups, my group members and Russell, we were finally able to create a pattern to laser cut (which I was quite comfortable with)

However, because my basics in sheet metal weren't well refined, I found the sheet metal part of the fuel tank exercise to be overwhelming at times and the result was quite disappointing, even after a second attempt.