Things I learned about life from tinkering about with Ponoko.com

Ok – so there have been a couple of iterations of the golden-mean caliper thing.

It started out as a cardboard thing:

then went through an interim straight-legged phase, from a design heavily borrowed from the internet

And then it went a bit curvy

So there you go. Edited hilights of a dangerous life.

So. This is what I’ve learned (about life etc)

1) You’re not going to get it right the first time.

No, not even you.

2) You’re not going to get it right the second time either.

Forget about it. You’re just not – especially if there are moving parts or the parts need to “work” with each other etc. Everything’s a bit wobbly. Nothing’s a perfect fit.

3) Design to your vitamin parts.

Find a button and make a suit for it in other words. If you drill a hole thinking you’ll find a bolt afterwards, you won’t. It’s a bit like Liebig’s Law of the Minimum: You will be dicked about by the things made by other people. 3rd-Party-Dickabout-Syndrome.

4) You won’t learn about the weaknesses/capabilities/possibilities of the materials until you actually physically play with the materials with your actual hands. In real life.

You need to cut your coat according to your cloth, in other words, and you won’t get a feel for your cloth until you’ve actually physically touched it. Once you’ve done this though, possibilities will blossom. Reality is your friend. Treasure it. Hang on to every moment with it. You’ll miss it when it’s gone.

5) Get a Dremel.

They’re useful. Get one with variable speeds.

6) Wear safety glasses when you use it.

It may (to your diseased imagination) look like a sex-toy with anger-management issues, but 30,000 rpm is A LOT stronger than you are. Bits fly off. Things explode.

7) Just because you’ve got it all worked out in your head, doesn’t mean it will work in reality

This should be written in biro on the foreheads of every free-market-fundamentalist in the world. So when they get home and look in the mirror they see

Just because you’ve got it all worked out in your head, doesn’t mean it will work in reality.
Just because you’ve got it all worked out in your head, doesn’t mean it will work in reality.
Just because you’ve got it all worked out in your head, doesn’t mean it will work in reality.

There. I’ve said it.

This bit me on the arse in the following way:

I thought I could make a better caliper by curving this, countersinking that… so the tips all meet up. The trouble with the straight arms one is that (unlike scissors say) the tips don’t close at a single point – the middle joints bump into each other so it can’t close properly.

So I figured that if you countersunk the middle joints and carefully arranged the layers, you could in fact get the points to close at a single point. I had it all worked out.

In my head.

What actually happened was this:

When all the points line up, the middle holes stop being 2 sides of a triangle, and instead become one point in an axis… which may then rotate freely. It’s mathmatically impossible for the fundamental maths behind this design to work… and for the tips to close.

And although I spent 6 years studying trig at school/uni, I’ve forgotten it now and can’t be arsed having to learn it all again. I’ve failed etc.

Still. Nice design innit? See how it glints evily in the moonlight… mmm… shiney…