Boxes 3/26

   In last post I said that we were only going to work on boxes for part of class on Monday... but I was kidding! We actually spent all of Monday working on our boxes. But, it was a good thing, because my box needed some major tweaking.
    So, on Monday I continued with my original plan of gluing my sides together. I used hot glue, but since hot glue is so gloopy my sides did not fit together nicely. Also, I could easily peel the glue off of the plastic, so the box was not very durable. It was not an aesthetically pleasing solution either; my box was covered in those annoying little strings that you get when you use hot glue. I totally should have known this would happen; I’m no newb when it comes to using hot glue guns. 
    My plan for closing the box on top did not work either. The tabs were not bendy enough to go under the other sides, and the sides were too wide. I did not consider the eighth of an inch on each side of the top that would be taken up by the spring when I made my drawings.
    On Monday, the design process began feeling less artificial as I had to go back and change my design matrix after I experimented and tested my ideas.
    I decided that making my finger joints fit together tightly enough that I would not need glue was not such a bad idea after all! Surprisingly it was not as hard as I thought it would be, which is mostly due to luck. All I had to do was make my finger joints trapezoidal instead of rectangular shaped, so they were wider on the outer edge by 1/32” (1/64” on each side). After I modified all of my sides so that they were like this, my pieces actually snapped together pretty well.

I also had to change the top of my box so that it would close. I decided to abandon the method involving tabs in favor of my professor's suggestion. He said that I should put a tab on the side of my box, like this

I think the way this was supposed to work was that the tab would hold the top with friction, and the spring hinge would push the edge of the box up to the tab. But, it never really clicked in my mind how it was supposed to work, and after I cut out one side I did not think it would work. So I changed the side that would go opposite of it before I cut it out so that it was wider on the top, like my joints, so that it would push against the tabs and stay closed. This actually kind of worked. I could get it to stay closed, but if I set the box on a table, the side top would fly open. I guess my next step is to get the other side to close...