Side Projects

Once I got my first internship, I bought a watch with my first paycheck.  I've started to collect watches, especially to remember meaningful times in my life.  Right now I have 3 and I wanted a cool way to display them.  This render shows my current progress.  The three slots each perfectly fit one of my watches so they fit snugly and flush with the top surface.  I've printed test fits for each watch and now I have to print the full model.  I've had trouble 3D printing this model, mainly because my black filament is ABS and I have more experience tailoring to PLA. Hoping to have it printed out soon!

To work on my freeform 3D modelling skills, I started to work on a chess set using retro game characters as the pieces.  Here you can see my model of Pacman.  This was done using Fusion360 which obviously isn't meant for unusual shapes like this.  In the future, I'd like to start using Blender which is more suited for character models. My goal was to make unique teams for each color, so there are plenty more characters to model!

During the height of COVID, my roommate and I became obsessed with the game Mastermind.  After a while, we figured out some improvements that could be made to the game.  As a result, I made some 3D printed parts that would fill some of our needs.  On the left, you can see the black and white pieces are now separated and each pocket has a ramped edge to make sliding one out easier. In the front, there is the lid to the peg pocket.  On the reverse side I added small pockets to organize colors into Yes, No, or Maybe to help keep track of my progress.  Finally, on the upper right, you can see my reset slider which slides under the game board to remove all the pegs quickly and easily.

My roommate likes to customize his truck for overlanding, and got this switchboard for his accessories. The enclosure he bought for the board and switches didn't fit the switchboard he bought, so he asked me to create an adapter. I went through a couple prototypes to find the best attachment solution, and to ensure that all parts had a great fit. Since none of the parts had their own drawings, I had to recreate the enclosure and switchboard in SolidWorks first to develop the rest of the parts. The trickiest part of this build was radii on all of the parts. There was a mix of metric and imperial measurements, and without proper radius gauges, I had to use some hacky methods to figure out what would fit best.

One day on the side of the road I found a little gravity bubble toy in a box labelled "Free". It's one of those toys that you can flip over and over and see colored oil stream down the center like a timer. I thought it would make a fun project to try to make something that would automatically rotate it when the oil had all reached the bottom. I've been working on it for a few weeks on and off and have gotten to the point where a few parts are already printed! I'll post more as I get it closer to a full assembly.

Come back often to see what I'm working on next!