David Rake - Puzzle Box Series

Throughout this semester I am creating Puzzle Boxes. Puzzle Boxes are boxes that can be opened via a mechanical sequence. These boxes either blatantly appear as a lock box or are more inconspicuous.

Drawers:

Concept: My first box if seen from the front appears as almost a chest of drawers except they're vertical. It has five vertically moving bars and one horizontally moving bar at the bottom. I started drawing and creating it last spring but didn't get far before realizing how confusing it is to reverse engineer a puzzle that doesn't exist.

Method: I did some brief sketches with the intended solution which was later ripped apart and recreated. The original solution was eight steps and was changed to a seven step one because I realized a flaw that made it solvable in three steps originally. After deciding the way the puzzle moves and is solved I created curves in rhino simulating my drawings. Then I started to test build it in 3d space to make sure all the pieces fit together and solve it before it was physically made. All Rhino files for all three boxed rely heavily on curves and grid snaps.

I built did a test build of this box with MDF pieces. I discovered some major flaws I looked over when originally designing it. In order for the box to work as originally intended I would have to make some major changes to the box. I decided to move on to my next box idea as I gained much knowledge about how to create these and I was frustrated with the physical appearance of this design.

Materials: I originally planned for it to be laser cut, but I tried out the idea of 3d printing it and that was too costly so I have fallen back on laser cutting. I am using MDF for my first build but if it goes well I may look into other materials like more aesthetically pleasing woods.

Cubic Box:

Concept:  My second box idea quickly came to me while working on the first box and I almost finished the second box before the first because of my excitement about it. It is more of an inconspicuous box and is not clear on how to even start tackling the box.

Method:  I did some brief sketches and ran through multiple iterations on how to do the internal locking mechanisms. It wasn't until I had a dream about it that I really figured out the best way for this first version. I started with a square shape and added and subtracted from that shaped to create all the parts. I use space much smarter than in the first box so this one is much more compact. This box is 6 in. x 6 in. 6 in. and contains a total of 59 parts.

I built this box with MDF. It took 8 hours to assemble the parts. Overall I was very happy with it and I learned how to improve the structural integrity of the mechanical parts. The box however didn't lock properly and to it's fullest potential. I improved my rhino design and cut out a new version.

The 2nd box came together in 5 hours after the parts were cut. It feels much more sturdy and all the locks up until the final step work smoothly. The last lock which I was worried about but hoped I had fixed was still causing issues. I thought about reworking the entire box to change how the locks function. Thanks to my roommates I discovered that the final lock can work and just needs some additional changes and reinforcements to work. This box is easily the box I am the most proud of regardless of the fact I do not have a fully functional version.

Materials: All the test builds are made of MDF. This box especially would look magnificent with some nicer woods, as it looks more inconspicuous than the other two.

Engraved Lock Box:

Concept: This box was much influenced by my Dungeons and Dragons (D&D) campaign. I planned to create a box that they would solve through the campaign as they played. Due to group and personal reasons, they will never reach the point the box would have entered the story. I planned to do two and was left with one that could be solved by the outer pictures and another I keep blank to better showcase internals.

Method: This box was the most heavily sketched with more pages than shown of ideas for puzzles and combinations, especially related to the D&D campaign. I laid out the box with interlocking joints with extra space for aesthetics I planned for much later. The locking system inside contains inner walls that prevent the entire top piece from being removed. The combination is made from three separate dials. Once all three dials are correct the bar below them can be pushed into them to unlock the box. the dials and locking mechanism can clearly be seen once the box is open. Each dial has 8 options engraved on them. Arranging text at an angle precisely was a fun thing to overcome. My demonstrative box has 2-4 Roman Numerals on dial option. None of the Roman Numerals repeat to avoid being able to solve the box based on exploits.

Possibly as a result of the extensive drawing before hand the very first iteration of this box worked like a dream. However the second box that was cut from the same sheet of MDF at the same time did not want to fit together as nicely. This box also contains the largest area for actually containing things out of the three boxes. If I were to create more I'd add markers on the top layer on which way the dials are supposed to face to avoid confusion.

The Demonstrative puzzle features four pictures (JFK, Boot Print, Eagle, Flag) related to the moon landing from NASA. I took these four images and used Adobe Illustrator's Image Trace. I then used the Expand tool and took the curves into Rhino, Exploded, and Joined the curves. I trimmed the curves and deleted some entirely to make it more clear and less busy.

Materials: The test for the box was using MDF. I added Copper Pipe on the edges to add an aesthetic appeal outside of just the box materials and am pleased with how it adds to the box.

If anyone would like to cut out a blank box you can get the template I made here

End Notes: From this semester I learned much about creating mechanically moving parts with the Laser Cutter. The first two boxes were very frustrating when they did not work as intended. When I assembled the third box it was amazing because of all my planning it came together and worked exactly how I had hoped.

Practically all three of the boxes would be made of a nicer wood than MDF, but making see-through acrylic boxes would be delightful. I cannot express how happy I am with these boxes and how much I've learned through them. 

David Rake Week 10: Cardboard Ball

Concept:
    I had started working on this costume prior to this Halloween as I have wanted to build it for over a year but was deciding on wether or not to do full dress up attire or not. I decided to make the mask and a more casual clothing arrangement for the character Cayde-6 from the game Destiny.

Techniques: 
    Using an already built model that I rebuilt in Rhino to fix some errors in the model I 3D printed it. I Sealed the mask and Painted 2-3 coats on each piece of the desired colors. I later went back and painted on diluted black acrylic and wiped it off to weather it. The Mask was printed in four separate pieces which with minimal sanding was able to slot together and glue in place. As for the clothes I bought a gray hoodie, jeans, and yellow converse. On the gray hoodie I first painted on a white spade, a signifying symbol of the character. Later on I marked some red insignia on the side of the hood and made a line down the left arm. No changes were made to the pants. On the shoes on the outward facing side of both shoes a gray circle was painted along with a white spade on top.

Materials:
    3d Printed with PLA, 6 total colors of acrylic used between the mask and other clothes. Underneath the mask is a see-through mesh with velcro attached to it, the hoodie, and the mask to keep them all in place. Cotton Hoodie, Denim Jeans, and Converse Shoes.

David Rake Puzzle Box Progress

Throughout this semester I am creating Puzzle Boxes. Puzzle Boxes are boxes that can be opened via a mechanical sequence. These boxes either blatantly appear as a lock box or are more inconspicuous.

Attention: If anyone has any intention to solve these blindly ignore the pictures as the give away clues.

Drawers:

Concept: My first box if seen from the front appears as almost a chest of drawers except they're vertical. It has five vertically moving bars and one horizontally moving bar at the bottom. I started drawing and creating it last spring but didn't get far before realizing how confusing it is to reverse engineer a puzzle that doesn't exist.

Method: I did some brief sketches with the intended solution which was later ripped apart and recreated. The original solution was eight steps and was changed to a seven step one because I realized a flaw that made it solvable in three steps originally. After deciding the way the puzzle moves and is solved I created curves in rhino simulating my drawings. Then I started to test build it in 3d space to make sure all the pieces fit together and solve it before it was physically made.

Materials: I originally planned for it to be laser cut, but I tried out the idea of 3d printing it and that was too costly so I have fallen back on laser cutting. I am using MDF for my first build but if it goes well I may look into other materials like more aesthetically pleasing woods.

Cube:

Concept:  My second box idea quickly came to me while working on the first box and I almost finished the second box before the first because of my excitement about it. It is more of an inconspicuous box and is not clear on how to even start tackling the box. For the picture below I did not use Ghosted because it was very confusing looking.

Method:  I did some brief sketches and ran through multiple iterations on how to do the internal locking mechanisms. It wasn't until I had a dream about it that I really figured out the best way for this first version. I started with a square shape and added and subtracted from that shaped to create all the parts. I use space much smarter than in the first box so this one is much more compact. For the picture below I was using red and purple because it was easier on my eyes to work with.

Materials: I'm using MDF for my first cut out and would LOVE to move to a nicer wood if it works as well as I hope. I think this design will be one of the prettiest out of all since it is more inconspicuous.

Engraved Lock Box:

Concept: This box is much in its infancy but I wanted to create a box with a puzzle on the outside in engraved pictures. I may create two of these specific boxes with one having pictures that can be translated to a solution and one for my Dungeons and Dragons Players for them to solve with clues from their adventures.

David Rake: Week 10 - Serial Slice

Concept:

For years I've been making helmets. I've wanted to make Thomas' helmet from Daft Punk but never got around to it or had all the skills I needed for it. Over Spring Break I had plans to finally start it and had a plan for how I would go about it. As this project came up I thought it'd be interesting to try this new method (to me) to create the base for the master mold.

Technique:

I created a Sphere as the base and drew out curves to block off the major parts. After blocking off the main extensions of the mask I created the slopes by extruding curves and using booleans to sculpt almost. I got the model as close to picture references as I could then inserted the two cores, one in the front where the absolute bottom is and one at the top of the helmet. The helmet was then sliced into 43 individual pieces.

Materials:
The original helmet is chrome and eventually I would like to get it to that point, The Serial Slice will be Cardboard. The mold will be silicon. Then the cast will be resin or fiberglass depending if I chrome it myself or not.

Final:

I changed the axis the cuts were on from my original choice of front to back and instead chose top to bottom as it contained more details that I wanted.

David Rake: Week 11 - Laser Engraving

Concept:

I made a replica Thomas helmet from the band Daft Punk for the Serial Slicing Assignment. I thought the helmet would look decent if it was repeated a couple of times in a horizonal direction. Almost like the neon 16 bit art.

Technique:
I used the make2d command to pull a perspective view of the head to get the majority of its aspects. After I replicated it 3 times and combined the outer curves. Originally I just engraved the helmet lines and it turned out alright but seemed too simple. After I took the three helmets and applied a different density hatch to each.

Materials:

From the start I planned on using Acrylic. The original helmet is chrome and reflective. The helmet stands out but in a different way than paint. Acrylic is one of the closer replacements because its clear unlike most other engravings on wood or such.

David Rake Week 12: Waffle Lava Lamp

Concept:

Growing up I always had lava lamps in my room, 4 or 5 at any given time. Now when I hear lamp that is almost always what my mind thinks of. If not its that one lamp that loomed over my father's reading chair. Regardless I thought a typical lava lamp would look cool.

Techniques:

I started by drawing the outer edges with the curve tool. I created 7 vertical columns using polar array and 4 horizontal planes. I extruded and capped the curves. I then used boolean tools to create the indents. I do not have the hole cut out for the actual light yet. I inverted the lava lamp design because the top of lava lamps are typically pointed or at least tapered. To create the aperture for the actual light would leave steep columns which didn't look particularly good.

Materials:
With Keyshot I chose a shiny blue plastic that looks close to my favorite lava lamp from my childhood. Upon building it I used cardboard and it was stronger than I originally thought it would be. For the light I used a small 7W Led bulb.

David Rake: Week 13 - Pepekura

Concept:

About 4 years ago a game by the name of Battleblock Theater came out and the character I played as I really loved. The character has since been used as my avatar on social platforms. In senior year of high school I made a 3d model of this originally 2d character. I 3d Printed the character as well. This character has no official name but has gone been titled the abomination by my close friends at the time but I prefer the friendlier name of Catty. 

Technique:

Although I still had the model I created back in high school, it was not a good model as I knew very little about modeling. Pepekura violently rejected the model and I slowly remodeled every piece trying to salvage the original model but alas that didn't prevail.

After fighting Pepekura and getting everything laid out and cut I started with the legs. I build each leg separately. I then built the arms and connected the legs to the torso. Then I connected the arms. Overnight I filled the legs with expanding foam to give them some weight and make him more rigid. I taped every seam on the body because as a cartoon character all his edges are black and I wanted to closely replicate that. After the body was complete I assembled the eyes, ears, mouth, and head separately. I fastened the head on the body and added the facial features afterwards.

In the future I plan to build a stand for him as he cannot stand on his own most of the time (this was planned). I did not want to cut off his feet in order to add standing capability. I also do not know at this point what I want to do for whiskers or if I want to add them at all.

Material:

I used plain 1ply cardboard and black electrical tape. If I were to redo him I would coat all the white cardboard in Aluminum tape because I think it'd be interesting as I've never thought of this character making it to the real world on this scale.

David Rake: Week 8 - Prosthetic

Concept:

As an avid Mechanical bike rider I aimed for a bike related prosthetic. From the original drawing to the actual model slight tweaks were made in favor of a more realistic design. Instead of trying to curve the gears around a leg shape they were laid flat so actual gears could be put in place and be kinetic as well. Another addition is at the bottom where the foot would normally be I put a typical clip design for clip in shoes on road bikes.

Technique:

Starting with the gears they were modeled with curves and the teeth were polar arrayed around the center and slightly modified for imperfections. The top gear has 16 teeth and the bottom gear has 12 teeth. The indents in the gears were subtracted later using booleanDifference along with the holes going through them. In regards to the chains they are made with curves as well. They contain of 2 circles and a small curvy hourglass shape with a larger version of the same shape just outside of it.

These hourglass shapes were alternated along the pattern to create the full chain link. The smaller gear is directly in the center of the larger gear and so the chain tapers off towards the bottom instead of going straight up and down which I found difficult to work with. After trying (unsuccessfully) polar arrays to wrap the chains around the gears I resorted to manually rotating the chain around, which was not near as hard as I thought it'd be.

 The 2 gears and chain were then duplicated and positioned around the origin. The Bottom gear was rotated inward to almost create a seal in between the sets of gears. A cylinder was added in the center with other cylinders matching the angle of the gears to ensure a flat looking cap. the gears were booleanUnion(ed) to the cylinders and the bottom piece was added on with more simple boolean cylinder cutouts in the bottom for clip in pedals.

Materials:

I used a darker metal (Anodized Black) for the inner cylinder and gears. The chain used a lighter metal to highlight it (Chrome polished). These two materials are ironic due to their real world counterparts where the chain would more likely be dark due to oil and more abusive wear than the gears. This reverse setup looked much better in this situation however. The other material scheme caused the inner pieces to be difficult to see in depth.

David Rake - Week 5 - Prosthetic Sketch

Concept:

I bike regularly so in a situation, where I lost a leg, it would be of high priority for myself to regain the ability to bike. The Prosthetic has 4 sets of gears resembling the gears on the bike. The top row has 16 teeth each and the bottom row has 12 teeth each. Each set has a chain in-between the the two gears.

Technique:

I plan to use polar array for rough placement of the gears and chains. Duplication will be used heavily to create the chain links and gears. Manipulation of individual pieces will be used to conform the object to the shape of the leg.

Materials:

Planned to ideally use metal parts, like gears and chains now, but metal 3d printing is not quite affordable and readily available.

David Rake - Hammer - Week 4

Concept:

I aimed for a more form fitting hammer that's a lower profile. In reality its probably inefficient for the common task at hand. A small notch was added to the back to help when applying thumb pressure.

Techniques:

 I heavily relied on building the hammer first in curves and now, after getting a better grasp of curves, prefer them to primitives. Only two difference booleans were used one on the head and one at the base of the handle. The metal head could use some extension because it appears that hands would hit the material before the head.

Materials:

Instead of going for wood or metal for the majority of the object a lime green and yellow plastic were chosen. This was to extenuate the curve and give a less serious tone to it. It appears as more toy/novelty than serious equipment.

David Rake - Mouse - Week 4

Concept:

For my mouse instead of doing smoothed pieces I tried a layered look. I had the two buttons break off from the rest of the layers and made into two separate pieces. After finishing the core features the gap at the front felt empty so a mouse-wheel type object was added with a cylinder through the middle instead of built onto a platform to add a suspended look.

Technique:

The bottom layer was drawn with curves. Each following layer was duplicated from the last and scaled down then manually edited with the control points to add shape from layer to layer. Such as the gap at the front had a short distance from layer to layer while the back had a larger gap. The core layers (all except the buttons) were union-ed then filleted with a heavy fillet at the bottom to be definitively smooth.

Materials:

Originally I went for a wood texture but it just wasn't looking as good as I hoped. I settled for a plastic material that most real world mouses share as well.

David Rake - Week 3 - Flashlight

Concept:
I originally planned to aim for a lightsaber, specifically Obi Wan's from the Phantom Menace, because I thought the ball form on the bottom would be interesting. As I went on I differed from reference and created the back and forth motion.

Process:
I used Arc to create the pom at the bottom and did some simple rectangle booleans before revolving the curve. After I revolved and made torus(es?) switchbacking up the shape then used boolean difference to indent the shell. I later added a simple button and a larger indent up top.

Materials:
I went Metallic with a darker and shinier inside to draw attention to the switch-backing that I found really attractive even if it may not be physically comfortable.