Finally Moving On To Metal

After weeks of working on a prototype, I am finally going to use the metal that has been sitting at my desk. To make the gauntlet out of metal, I first needed to build the design with some easily modifiable material like paper to make sure the design was fit properly to my arm. This step I am now done with. The next step would be to take apart the design into its individual pieces. Then, I would place the individual pieces onto the metal sheets and use a carving tool to carve out the shape of the piece onto the metal. Next I would cut out the pieces to roughly the same size as the carving so that I can sand down the edges. The next step which I likely won’t be able to do this week will be to bend and shape the pieces. The final step would be to drill out the holes and put the pieces together with facets.

Back To Where I Was

Last week I found out about my horrible mistake of making the prototype of the fingers wrong therefore making the two weeks that I spent working on the fingers alone totally wasted. If anything good came from this, it is that I now know that I can not just assume that I know how something should be built and that I should follow the directions as closely as possible. As well because of this, my glove that holds the pieces together has many more holes in it than needed, and this could compromise its structure when I am using the finished product.

This week, however, I am done with the prototype, and I am now back to where I was two weeks ago. With the prototype done I can now work on sketching the design onto the metal. Even though I lost a few weeks, I still feel that I am likely to complete my monthly goals until the end of my project.

Setbacks + Slowing Progress

Starting the week I found out about an annoying setback in my project. I found out that I built my prototype wrong, and I now have to rebuild the parts that were built wrong before. More specifically I built the fingers wrong. This is a huge setback because the fingers were the hardest parts to put together, and they took me around two school weeks to finish them. Even though failing allows me to learn, these setbacks have been making me feel as if I have been wasting my time and that I might not be able to finish what I have expected by the end of the school year.
Besides taking a step back with my project, I am still trying to make progress and I feel that I will be done with the prototype (again) this weekend and start working with the metal so that I can meet my goals for this month, by the end of the month.


The picture was taken after I ripped apart the failed fingers

The Build: Finished Prototype, Sketching Metal, and Prototyping Piston

This week I finished making the prototype of my gauntlet that is made out of paper. I put together the last finger, the thumb, and fastened the knuckle plate and the glove together. Now that the prototype is done I will start tracing the modified design on the paper to the sheets of metal that I have. To this I will have to first take apart the prototype of the gauntlet and use the paper pieces to trace the shapes and sketch them into the metal. This would allow me to snip out the pieces using snips to make the gauntlet out of

metal to make it a proper gauntlet; however, I feel that before I get to into finishing the gauntlet I should focus more on my piston. So next week I will be both working on sketching the design for the gauntlet onto my sheets of metal, as well as working on the design and prototype of the piston mechanism.