Press Fit Construction Kit // Musical Notes

For the Laser Cutter assignment, I thought of our semester project, the “Musikarium”, and therefore wanted to do something related to music. To visually construct music, one typically uses musical notes:

As one can see, with only 3 elements already most of the standard musical notes can be constructed:

• ellipse (for the note head)
• straight line (for the stem as well as connecting bars)
• curved line (for single quavers and semiquavers)

So in order to make a kit, those are the different elements that are needed.  Furthermore, the heads would only require one notch each to be connected, whereas the straight line elements should be used in more than one way and therefore needed a lot more notches. The curves were a bit tricky as well, since I wanted to to make semiquavers so one would have to be able to add up to 2 curves to each note. I made some rough sketches of how all the parts could be constructed.

Afterwards, I used Illustrator CS3 to make the final sketches that could then be imported into AutoCad.

The final cutting process involved several stages. I had originally chosen a 6mm thick flake board as my cutting material, but the laser burned the edges and the board turned out to be too thick as the laser couldn’t cut through properly even after several runs.

I then used 2 acrylic sheets (3mm) instead, a clear (for the stems) and a red one (for heads and curves).

In order to make the notches the right size, I first cut out a few test pieces which are marked in red (see above). The best fitting solution was a notch that was 3mm on the outside and 2.9mm on the inside, allowing them to connect tightly enough.

This results in the following final musical notes:

The stem elements turned out to be a very nice construction kit of their own, as they can be combined in various other ways and e.g. form entire shelving units: