Design, Fabricate Skate: Skateboarding as a gateway to digital fabrication

Design, Fabricate Skate: Skateboarding as a gateway to digital fabrication

This workshop is a survey of digital fabrication processes through the lens of making a custom skateboard deck. We use sk8CAD to create the mold for a custom deck which is cut from foam on a CNC router. Maple veneers are stacked up with waterproof wood glue and placed on the mold in a vacuum bag while the glue cures. The formed deck is placed back on the CNC router where the truck holes are drilled using the mold as a jig. The deck is then bolted to a 3d printed fixture through the truck holes which is screwed to the spoil board on the CNC for the profile of the deck to be cut.

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Art Bike Invasion - Lithuania

Art Bike Invasion - Lithuania

Who did that to my bike!? In fall of 2016 some unexpected visitors arrived at Artisans Asylum. They explained that the were from M-Labs a makerspace in Vilnius, Lithuania and they were on their way home from Burning Man. They had just started a project called Art Bike Invasion where they had just shipped a container full of abandoned bikes from Burning Man back to Lithuania where they planned to teach kids how to fix, modify, and upgrade these bikes. They found SCUL and immediately invited us to join them.

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Mission Control: A hands on STEAM program for kids

Mission Control: A hands on STEAM program for kids
Mission Control is a program developed by Mike Beach, Sal Mancini, and I at Artisan’s Asylum. This program was initially created in spring of 2020 just as the world shut down as a way we could deliver hands on summer programming to middle school aged students remotely. I came up with the idea that the 3 instructors are on Mars and the students are mission control who have to solve problems the astronauts run into. These problems ended up taking a few forms. Sal lead a design workshop to create a geodesic dome habitat for the Mars base. Students learned a bit of CAD in sketchup and some manual fabrication skills to trace, cut and assemble a model dome from card stock and clear sheet plastic. Mike and I worked closely together to develop a robotics platform based on the open source MeArm. We combined parts from the laser cut original and a 3d printed remix to create a kit that was faster and easier to produce and assemble. [Read More]

Product Design @ MIT

Product Design @ MIT

I joined the staff of the Product Design Lab in the mechanical engineering department as part of the shop staff. I assisted students with design feedback and ran the Shopbot CNC router to cut student designs. I also worked to provide fabrication support to students using the woodshop, electronics and other hand tools.

I worked on these classes:

2.00b! Toy Design Spiring 2023

2.009! Product Design Process Fall 2023

2.00 Intro To Design Spring 2024

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Artisans Asylum Winter Robotics Challenge

Artisans Asylum Winter Robotics Challenge

Artisans Asylum hosted a design thinking and robotics workshop for a group of international students from South Korea January 2019 and 2020. Students were presented with design thinking challenges to brainstorm, ideate, and down select ideas to make robots that could solve a specific problem. In 2019 they made robots that prepared food. In 2020 they designed a robot that could be helpful in everyday life and they made a model of a situation in daily life and a robot that could explore that model.

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Fab Academy

Fab Academy

Fab Academy is a course from the Fab Foundation which spun out of MIT’s Center for Bits and Atoms. This class is a survey of digital fabrication and design. The course is taught in a distributed model where each student signs up with a node or Fab Lab local to them. Each week for 20 weeks a new topic is introduced in a global online lecture and then students meet their local instructors for hands on practice in their lab. The first subject in the course is website development. Each student has 1 week to customize a portfolio they will use for the rest of the class and each subsequent week they must document their work on their site.

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DigiFab

DigiFab
I started learning digital fabrication from spending time at Artisan’s Asylum. I learned and taught 3d Printing and laser cutting at The Brookline Makery, a now closed maker space. I dove head first into digital fabrication by enrolling in Fab Academy in 2021. I enjoy 3d printing and laser cutting but my favorite tool that I’ve been introduced to is a 4ft x 8 ft CNC router. I have now used, setup, and trained people on CNC routers all over the country. Checkout my QuickBox project for one of my favorite applications of CNC routing. [Read More]