Going from the real world into the digital wonderland of Electric Playhouse is extremely exciting. We built an entry tunnel that stokes that thrill from the moment you set eyes on it in the parking lot. Check out the designing, planning, and construction work that went into building such a captivating threshold.
Installation Date: 12/06/2019
With the design finalized, Wesley and Fabricator Owen Schwab began the fabrication process.
Not having a shop of our own, we joined FUSE makerspace. FUSE Makerspace is a community center with tools that allow members to design, prototype, and create manufactured works. They have tools such as a laser cutter, CNC Router, vinyl cutters, welders and a full woodworking shop. Having access to fuse has been vital for us to do rapid prototyping and full fabrication.
This phase started with R&D of different materials and methods. We knew that we wanted to edge light each individual rib and diffuse the light. This proved to be quite challenging because there were over 500 different angles along the edges of the tunnel and none were the same. With the help of Owen and after many different tests of light diffusers, we decided to fabricate our own custom one. This ended up being made out of ¾” milky white acrylic.
From there, we moved into the CNC phase of the project. For this phase, we first had to create the cut files for the machine to understand where to cut. We wanted to optimize the material that we were using so we used a machine learning program to find the most efficient ways of laying out the parts on a sheet of plywood. Even with the nesting getting us to an average of 80% efficiency, the project still required over 66 sheets of plywood and over 400 individual pieces to be cut out.
Fun Facts!
Fabrication Time: 2 weeks
66 sheets of baltic birch
5 gallons of glue
10,000 staples
50 metal brackets
Time to cut: 40 Minutes per Sheet
6 CNC Bits destroyed
30 pencils lost to fuses floors
This phase took us about 2 weeks of running the 4’x8’ CNC router all day every day. While the machine was cutting new ribs we were assembling the recently cut ribs.
Once all the ribs were cut, we took them to a Bob’s Paint to be painted a durable white.
From there began the intensive wiring phase. This proved to be quite challenging. We were wiring over 10,000 individually addressable pixels and over 12 power supplies. During this phase, we realized that the led strips we were using were having too much power drop over the span of one rib. This then forced us to splice in power in two locations on each of the 25 ribs.
After all of the ribs were lit up and tested it was time to add the acrylic. For this, we first CNC’d the sheets of acrylic into “T-channels”. Then these t-channels were mitered, inserted into the slot in the ribs and using a heat gun, bent into the over 500 different angles for the tunnel.
