My partner, Riley Damon, and I first had an idea to create a water bottle boat but when we tried to design a model, we realized it wouldn't work. We changed our idea to fishing lures. We each designed 5 lures. We looked online at the shapes of some jigging spoons for ideas on what designs to create. 1 for the mill and 4 to be cut out by the laser. We took the inventor files and put them in sketch mode in Inventor and opened them in Illustrator. I created a template with the same dimensions as our recycled piece of acrylic. I saved them onto a flash drive and laser cut them out. When we were done with all 8 of the laser cut lures, we turned our attention to the mill cut lures. For my mill lure, it was thicker than our acrylic so I glued 2 pieces of acrylic to each other to make the correct thickness. One problem we ran into was that the plastic and hot glue was sticking to the bit and melting the milled lure. We just ran the job twice to get rid of the extra melted plastic. On the next milled lure we learned our lesson and added less glue. It cut out perfectly. Once we had cut our lures, we had to add some color. Some soda cans did the trick. We glued the acrylic down to the aluminum and cut the outline out with a scissors. Once that was done, we poked holes for the split rings and placed split rings in each of the hook holes and then added hooks. Once that was done our lures were ready for the water!!
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This project really made me think and truly understand the machines in the Innovation Center. We had a lot of issues with the mill and keeping our plastic down and it seemed like hot glue was the only solution. The router is a very precise machine and if not set up correctly, won't work. I learned that mill inside and out with the 3 class periods and study hall I spent working with it. Through all the frustrations, like, realizing we could use the laser, keeping the acrylic down in the mill, and keeping super glue off of our hands, I had a great time this semester and I am excited to see what the Innovation Center and Big Idea will become in these upcoming years even though I won't be there to experience it.