At home I have a small aquarium with a bio-filtration system I made using a mason jar and some airline tubing:

A biofilter cleans the aquarium water by having it travel through these small plastic or ceramic pellets aka filter medium (in this case ceramic), which provide ideal conditions for bacteria-eating microorganisms to flourish and eat the bacteria out of the water flowing through. My current filter setup is attached on one end to a pump inside the aquarium, pumping the aquarium water into the bottom of the jar, where the water rises through the filter medium and out through another tube at the top, back into the aquarium:

I want to rebuild this filter:

• to make it look like a home product by a mock internet infrastructure technology service called “EcoNet” that I’m working on
• to optimize the filtration process (it’s not very good at the moment) by designing separate chambers into the piece, enabling more thorough filtration and more controlled ability to measure / quantify water purity

I was initially opposed to building this because I need the material to be clear transparent, but since I couldn’t find proper recycled materials I figured the best I could do at the moment is use virgin plastic even though ultimately I’d like to avoid hypocritically using such materials to make products for projects that advocate environmental awareness. So although this is to be a finished, functioning filter, I consider it a prototype for a final version made possibly of glass or recycled/reclaimed materials.

So I picked out a 12″x18″ sheet of 1/8″ clear colorless acrylic and another of 1/4″. My design for the 1/8″ sheet is as follows (the smaller square is the bottom piece, the larger the lid):

For the 1/4″ sheet (the overlaying rectangles are pockets— I’m cutting two of the filter’s walls out of the 1/4″ sheet so that I have space to add pockets to carve out a few ledges to delimit the chambers with screens (I’m going to design or pick out the screens at a later time, the only requirements are that they don’t float and are semi-flexible so they can be placed inside):

I designed in the rounded legs as a place to screw the piece down while cutting.

I also bought a 1/4″ hard plastic bit from McMaster Carr.

I started cutting the 1/8″ acrylic sheet, but hadn’t realized they’d be  loose after just the first cut. This caused some cracked corners. I should have used the laser cutter for these pieces, so I ended up cutting the top and bottom squares on the laser cutter:

I also then added the product logo to the front face:

For the 1/4″ acrylic sheet, I made sure I cut small portions and ran the machine at a faster speed:

Pocket depth (less than half of ~0.25″ total thickness):

The sheet:

Second issue: I’d forgotten to set the pocket depth to negative, took me a good long while to figure this out:

This time the machine was correctly making multiple passes, which allowed me to see the position of the legs after a few:

So I paused the machine and carefully screwed them in:

But on the other face, the screw cracked the plastic:

It turns out the pockets were too deep, as the sheet was warped / not completely flat:

So I screwed down the center of the sheet and tried again with a new Z-origin:

I broke my bit by confusing the Y and Z axis controls at fast tracking speed, but thankfully I’d just finished 🙂

 

With all my parts cut, the next step is to drill the holes for the water entry and exit ducts. First some practice drills:

Then the real thing:

Both ducts drilled and tube adapters inserted:

Now to attach the faces. Since this container is to be filled with water, I need hermetically sealed corners. For this I used silicone aquarium sealant:

Taped the front face into position:

Added my first strip of sealant:

Placed the side face, making sure it was 90° and added some more strips of sealant:

Placed the bottom and the other side faces, used the throwaway square cutout to prop the faces at 90º:

Then taped down the back face:

Added sealant to the sides of the other faces:

And secured it into position:

This sealant needs to cure overnight.

 

I made a copy of the bit that kept going missing (after it was found) 🙂

First iteration — I designed in the tabs but they were too long and thin, so I ended up going back to make them just over .5in in length and a bit wider, removed the tab at the back of the bit, then manually added margins to the tip and the back and removed the side margins:

Final iteration with fixed tabs — the tip took hours to figure out, it’s a combination of a stretched cone, a cone with parts subtracted from it, and a custom shape extruded upward then distorted into a helix:

Cut a 7″ piece of poplar:

Done:

After very carefully removing the shape from the block on the band saw and sanding:

I designed a two-finger ring with a flat top surface for engraving/writing/drawing/sticking things onto. It’s designed to fit my middle and ring fingers.

I began with a quick planning phase on paper:

Completed the Vectorworks design in under 30 minutes. I placed the design in the desired position and orientation relative to the origin point even though that’s to be done in the CAM software:

I went and purchased some poplar from Metropolitan Lumber in SoHo. I was told poplar was the next best thing from pine, and I think it looks great for the price. The minimum purchasing length was 8′, so that’s what I got, at 4″ width and 1.75″ thickness:

I cut a 6″ slice to work with:

I had trouble orienting the design so that the tabs would appear on the correct axis… or rather, the material’s proportions were somehow off. As you can see in the image below, two of the tabs don’t appear to be attached to surrounding material. Note that I also lied to the CAM software by an inconsequential .27″ of the material’s X width:

I decided to move forward anyway. What the cut would look like:

After installing the 1/4″ round-tip end mill, I was ready to start cutting:

It took 5-10 minutes just to reach the material surface:

The poplar seemed to be cutting pretty nicely:

Beginning the other side:

RIP:

I think the tabs failed to do their job? They were either too thin, or there weren’t enough of them? Maybe the two of them that appeared not to attach to anything in the CAM software were actually not attached to anything?

The backside of the piece is completely sliced off… the top surface of the ring should protrude from the finger slot portion by .25″:

The first side came out perfectly:

Although a failure, this was of course a productive learning experience. I’m still unsure what exactly went wrong, but in the future I think I can mitigate such issues by considering the how the tabs work when designing the piece.

For this assignment I planned to stick with the generic design provided:

I started off with the other half of the firewood block I’d used for the first lathe cut (the one on the right):

I first cut the block into a cylinder with a diameter matching the max width of the piece (1 1/4″). Then I penciled off the various parts and cut:

Finished lathe cut:

The ends cut off using the band saw:

At this point I realized I should have drilled the required screw and bar holes before finishing on the lathe, so instead I’d have to use the drill press. I was initially going to mount the piece for drilling like so:

But the wood was very soft, so in order to clamp it tight enough to keep it in place I’d end up compressing it and drilling an oblong ellipse. So instead I used the v-block with some cardboard support underneath:

I eyed the position of the screw holes and drilled them the same way:

After this I shaped the “kicker” at the sanding belt:

And finally sanded the whole piece:

I started off with a chunk of firewood that had a big curve in the center, so I took it to the band saw and cut it into two pieces and trimmed off some knots and corners:

I decided not recreate the handle demonstrated in the skill builder, but I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do instead. Before figuring that out I cut the block into a cylinder using the large round-nose scraper, which took about 20 minutes:

I decided to just go with the flow, and end up with some abstract sculptural piece:

This took about 40 minutes to an hour to complete. Something about this very involved, hands on experience… the tactile satisfaction of cutting away at the wood makes this hands down the most fun and rewarding tool in the shop for me. I wanted to explore curvature and ended up doing this progressively compressed wave design. The smallest cavity to the left required the tiny gouge scraper, and the tighter curves were done with the small round-nose scraper. Once finished I took it back over to the band saw to chop off the ends, and sanded it a bit:

Wow! Straight out of a Pier 1 catalog. My mom will love this.

Before cutting my final material I made some tweaks to the Vectorworks design. I added 0.02 inches to the thickness of the slots (I figured it would be better to go a little too loose than not fitting at all), as well as some dog bone corners in areas that I’d overlooked before:

3-ply Canadian birch from Midtown Lumber. I might have been ripped off but this costed me $96 for a 4’x8′ sheet. That’s how confident I was in my design and prototype. I had half of the sheet cut into two 2’x4′ pieces, and finished the table in two cutting jobs (as per the designs above):

The sheet corners ended up being pretty accurate right angles, so my cuts went very smoothly. Took about 45 minutes from start to finish, including changing boards. Here is the first cut, the surface and support beam:

The two identical legs:

After sanding:

Assembled (requires no screws or pegs — it’s completely detachable):

Sadly the table is structurally weak — the legs are too thin, the slots are actually a little too loose, and the joints which the legs attach to the table surface aren’t designed in a way that provides them with enough side-to-side integrity. I’m not sure why I had so much confidence in my design when I’d never actually built a piece of furniture in my life. I still think this piece is salvageable though, perhaps with diagonal support beams between the legs.