Project 3: Acrylic Paper Holder
The goal of this project was pretty simple: make a paper holder out of acrylic, ball bearings, and some magnets. It needs to hold three pieces of paper and stick to any ferromagnetic surface.
Sketching
Since I already knew roughly how it was going to work, I decided to start sketching a few different variations to see what looked the most aesthetically pleasing. I really liked the idea of an arrow pointing to the paper that was being held.
Prototyping
I started by making a few arrow shapes in Solidworks, and making some paper prototypes on the laser cutter to check the shape. My first two prototypes were both too short and had bad placement of holes for the magnets.
I kept modifying the design for the wider arrow until I was happy with it. Then I moved on to laser-cutting the first acrylic prototypes. It took a few tries to engrave the text. Press-fitting the magnets was initially very promising.
Next was heat-bending the first prototypes and adding the ball bearing. This didn't have enough magnets in it, so it would fall down when holding paper. Trying to press-fit in a second set of magnets cracked the acrylic. I made two prototypes with the arrows I had cut out, and neither of them would hold enough paper.
The next set of prototypes had extra magnet holes of a slightly larger diameter. I heated up the acrylic too much and it started to bubble, but one of these three held five pages so I was happy.
I learned slightly from last week and found a non-white background to take pictures on (acrylic on white is really hard to see). I should have picked a darker color, but this was better.