Laser Cut Plant Holder

I decided to make a plant holder because I had just gotten a new plant/pot. And design-wise, I knew this would be a pretty straight forward lap joint design that would need 3 parts per assignment requirements.

1. a CAD software (I used Fusion 360)
2. 1/8" thick plywood
3. laser cutter

To begin, I sketched my the shape of my design. This step was pretty straight forward and it wasn't too difficult to imagine what I needed to do.

Designing in Fusion 360 was also pretty simple. I made half of a rectangle and a tall rounded point and then mirrored this over a centerline. I then duplicated this shape and made a circle that fit pretty snug. My mistake was duplicating my shape before adding the lap joint lines because when I duplicated the shape some of my constraints got messed up. This made it so I was able to center my lap joint gap in my original shape, however, when I tried to use the midpoint constraint to the center of second shape, it messed up the other lines. I ended up being able to draw a center line through the middle of the shape and then use the mid point constraint to that. I then followed to steps to extrude and export.

The cutting process went smoothly until the final product came out and the pieces would slide into each other as the lap joint gap was too small. I still don't know the reasoning for this as I made sure my parameter for my lap joint width was 1/8", I made sure the diameter of my extrusion was 1/8", and I made sure my kerf setting was set to .25mm. However, while looking at the piece it seems that the lap joint width was half of the thickness of the wood and so I confirmed with a caliper. I thought the simplest fix for this was to go back into my sketch and just double the width of my parameter for the joint to .25in instead of .125in. I don't know if there was a "better" way to fix this but with the lack of time, this seemed the easiest way.

After I fixed the lap joint width, I went through the process of extruding and exporting again. After this edit, the pieces were able to fit together nicely.

My finished product functions well and is exactly what I had envisioned. The only thing that is a little off is the joints not meeting exactly but it still functions properly. I needed to make one lap joint longer than the other, but I honestly don't know how I would have calculated that. Overall, I am very happy with my design and my mint plant fits perfectly!

I thought this reading was really interesting and related to the aspects of bottom up design, however I didn't really use a bottom up process for this project. I think bottom-up design is great when you can really play around with the materials in your hands and experiment with different iterations. I make jewelry and a lot of my designs come from me just playing around with different chains, charms, and beads. However, for a project like this where it begins in my mind/paper and i can't really play around with a sheet of plywood, it is difficult to create from the bottom-up. Instead, I took a top-down approach where I came up with an idea, sketched it out, and then began creating it. Even though this reading didn't help me a lot with my design process for this project, I really enjoyed reading it and thinking about how natural forms in nature can help my design processes in the future.