The White Towel

I’m giving up. Yes, I know that goes against the whole Maker philosophy but I can’t help it. I had accounted for the weight of the whole box preparing to have kids be able to play with it, but what I’m discovering is that I didn’t account for the weight of the maze in relation to the glue. So as the maze has gotten more complex with more connections, the pieces are just snapping off and falling apart. I am at the pinnacle of frustration. My husband suggested switching to an epoxy instead of the silicone glue I was using but I really wasn’t up for scraping off all the silicone and starting over. 

There are several other things that I could have done better but didn’t realize until after it was too late. Still, I learned a lot and have a few new skills I can use, (table saw primarily.) 

My biggest issue at this point is what exactly to do with 6 squares of silicone smudged Plexiglas with holes drilled in them. I mean, I paid $35 for them so I don’t want to just toss them. Any ideas?

If you are interested is attempting this project I would love to hear the improvements you made and how they worked. I still am excited by my initial idea and I think there’s something there. I just couldn’t make it work this time around. Here is the Handout of the steps I took. Good luck!

Catching Up/Stepping Back

I took a little break from my project these weekend due to extreme frustration with it and the general need to get some other stuff done. I went down to work on it Thursday afternoon and one piece I’ve been having trouble with feel off AGAIN and so I really just needed to step back.

So instead I threw myself into some house projects that have needed to get done, and God help my husband right now. See, we’re both off work (he’s a teacher, I work in a school library, so you know.) But I need to feel productive, so I’ve been a bit of a slave driver this past weekend. 

However! The potting bench that I designed and he built is finally finished and I am thrilled with it! Last summer he built himself a ten foot tool bench from free plans he found online. This summer, I told him I wanted a similar bench, but only five feet, and on lockable wheels so I can push it out of the garage and do my potting in the sunny driveway. He did that but also added pegboard on one side so all my tools are handy. I’ve already pulled it out a few times. It’s great. Not really my project, but still a project. 

Then, we tore out a raised flower bed in front of our house that had become completely run over with weeds and a mysterious shrub that was just in bad shape. We put down new landscape fabric, Colorado river rock and some nice new matched shrubs that will fill in and give the front of the house good color in the winter. A Friday well spent. 

This weekend we finally got around to crawling around in our hot, stuffy, dusty, scary attic crawl space to install actual lights in our two main floor bedrooms. Okay, Paul finally got around to it, but I helped measure and I held the ladder and I made a nice dinner to say thank you, so it was a joint effort. Our house is old and didn’t have hard wired lights in either of the bedrooms. Now I actually have light switches and lights. 

Now, I’m about to head out and help rip out a walkway of pebbles that is also overgrown with weeds and the pebbles go everywhere in our yard. We’re paving it over with brick.

Before writing this post, I finally went back to my maker project to try and figure it out. The one piece that fell off has now fallen off about three times and I’m thinking I’m not going to get it stay. But seeing as I’ve given up on the whole marble  maze idea and moved onto “Abstract Art Sculpture” instead, I may just leave the random hole as part of the statement of the piece. 

Project Not Really Working Out

So, if you read my last post, you’ll know that I’m learning a lot by trial and error here and finding out a lot. I think a big hurdle for my project has been that I didn’t really find anything quite like it anywhere so I’m kind of having to make up this whole process on my own and applying knowledge from one area to a totally different area. 

I’m having three major issues. The first is glue. I’m using the same glue to connect the acrylic to PVC pipe and to vinyl tubing. So I have three different materials and I think that’s really messing me up. I couldn’t find the “acrylic cement” that all the tutorials said to use when connecting acrylic. Supposedly, this cement actually reacts with the acrylic to melt it onto itself. I could have ordered it online but delivery would have taken too long. There’s PVC cement, but it doesn’t work on vinyl or acrylic. So I went with a “all-plastics” silicone glue that the Home Depot guy suggested. It works okay on the PVC and the vinyl, and it seems to work on the acrylic, but not as well. Most pieces are sticking unless they are jarred too much, in which case they snap off and I have to re-glue them. 

The second is time. I thought I could construct most of this in a day or two, but I’m finding that I have to wait for the glue to completely set before I attach the next piece or it just falls apart. So I’ve been slowing working my way around inside gluing one or two pieces at a time, giving them 4-5 hours to set and then coming to do the next. It’s a little tedious. 

The third major issue is precision. If my two connectors are even 1 or 2 degrees off from lining up with each other, the tube doesn’t fit between them and I either snap a piece off or I have to sit holding the pieces together forcibly while I wait for the glue to dry.

At this point, I’m over $100 in so I don’t really want to start over. And I thought about scraping off all the old glue and trying something new, but now time is a bit of an issue. I think I’m just going to keep pushing ahead. I’ve completely scrapped the idea of “test-driving” my toy with kids because it’s far too fragile. It looks really cool, so I’m thinking of changing it from a “Marble Maze Toy,” to an “Abstract Art Piece.”

I think I’ll call it something absurd like, Mother Goose Doesn’t Live Here Anymore. 

Acrylic Snow and Safety Goggles

So I’m halfway into my project and I already have a few pointers I’ve learned: 

a. If your glue looks messy and is frustrating you, the solution is NOT to apply more glue hoping to cover it up. 

b. Cat hair sticks to acrylic like a magnet. Also, cats are curious about this strange thing you just brought into the house and must rub all over it. Acrylic doesn’t hold cat scent very well, so they must continue rubbing until you get exasperated and put it on top of the scary deep freezer they never go near. And now you are working in the basement on top of the deep freezer. Because you’re cool like that. And the cats totally don’t rule you. You are definitely still in charge. 

c. The Centennial High School shop teacher removes all saw blades and hides them for the summer for some unknown reason. And the cabinet labeled “Saw Blades” is a farce. There are no saw blades. In other words, we could not use the school wood shop as planned and had to cut the acrylic at home using our second-hand, slightly askew table saw. 

d. Cutting and drilling acrylic sprays a surprisingly large amount of acrylic “snow” all over the place. This “snow” however, is burning hot and when you’re trying to push a long piece of acrylic through a table saw it will take all of your willpower to not stop and shake it all off. Wear long sleeves, a turtleneck, long pants, closed-toed shoes and gloves.

e. Also goggles. Trust me on this one. You’ll want them. If you have one those welding masks I would recommend it. I’m not kidding, this snow goes everywhere and it’s HOT. It will hit your face like bacon grease and you will want to freak out. But don’t. Because your box won’t fit together perfectly if your lines aren’t perfectly straight. 

f. Frustratingly, slower is better when cutting/drilling acrylic. If you go too fast, your lines end up all jagged and rough and look terrible, like the saw blade chewed up the acrylic instead of slicing it. Slower produces even, professional looking lines. But don’t forget you’ll be barraged by white-hot acrylic bacon grease snow. Seriously, cover up. 

g. The first time you use new tools to create a glue-streaked, smudgy, crooked, cat-hairy, acrylic box all by yourself will be a shining moment. Relish in it. Because you are never doing it again. 

Cameo Silhouette and supplies

I am really proud of the project I made using the shape I cutout with the Cameo Silhouette in class on Monday.

So, I had created the silhouette figure in class, and then I went to Goodwill for an old $0.50 book for the background which I glued onto a tagboard background. Luckily, frames were on sale at Target so I was able to get that frame for about $30.00. I texted a picture to my mom and she was immediately jealous. I really like how it turned out.

In other news, we went shopping for supplies for my project today and already got to make more adjustments to the plan. Yay! I had planned on using special PVC wall flanges to attach the maze to the cube on the inside, but we couldn’t find any. Instead, we found a silicone glue that works on a variety of plastics, including PVC, plexiglass, and the vinyl tubing. This made me extremely happy, because I am still keeping weight in mind, and wanting to keep the box as lightweight as possible. Eliminating the wall flanges also eliminates the needs for screws, simplifying the project even further. I asked Paul to take lot of pictures of me picking out materials and shopping, but most of them are blurry or just in general, terrible pictures. So, I’ll include them in my final handout.

Now, I’m at the point where I’m trying to decide what to make for our next project. I feel like I’d like to try my hand at the Cameo again, maybe making something out of the vinyl. I’m going to look at some things over the weekend and decide what exactly I want to do.

Thunderbirds and Peace Pipes – my imaginary week off…

I’ve been blissfully unconnected for the last week as we went camping in southwestern MN for the week of 4th of July. I was expecting the campsite to have free Wi Fi (naturally it didn’t work way back at our site,) and I was expecting my 4G phone would be a nice backup. Nope. Nothing. Occasionally we would pop into a coffee shop and my phone would light up as all the updates/notifications/missed calls/texts/emails came through but generally I was unreachable. It was wonderful. To be honest, I had purposefully not brought any homework as this was my first real break in about  a year, but I was still hoping to keep up with reading blogs. Alas, that didn’t happen.

Anyway, I had wanted to really give myself a breather and wasn’t planning on doing any school work, but I found myself thinking about Making anyway. We visited two sites that while I didn’t plan on it, seemed to fit in perfectly with class. The first is a site nobody seems familiar with, but I’ve been wanting to see for years – Jeffers Petroglyphs. This is a site near Jackson, MN where you can go and see petroglyphs carved into the rock on the prairie. Some cool facts about Jeffers: the oldest carvings are estimated to be between 7,000-9,000 years old, and the newest are 150 years old. Which makes this site older than Stonehenge and the Pyramids, except it has been in continual use. It was considered a sacred site by the native peoples, and there is evidence that people traveled from all over to carve in these rocks. One particular carving of a dog was found at Jeffers and at a site in southern New Mexico and they are pretty sure it was carved by the same person. One of my favorite carvings was  the oldest at the site, there are three Thunderbirds carved next to each other.

While there, we also saw a demonstration of an “atlatl” which is a device used for spear throwing, and pre-dates bows and arrows. There are several atlatls carved into the rocks, which show how important this tool was to ancient people.

The other site we went to was Pipestone, a site where sacred rock was and still is quarried and carved into pipes for use by Native Americans. Written evidence suggests that the quarries were being used in 1637, but it is likely they are even older. Like Jeffers, Pipestone is considered an extremely sacred place by Native Americans, and the stone quarried is considered sacred as well. One Native American likened it to a church and Bible.

During my visits to these places, I couldn’t help but make connections to this class, and how these ancient people were Makers, in their own way and their own purposes. They created, crafted, and shared knowledge. What’s more, they marked their accomplishments, with carvings or tools that could be viewed for years. What we’re doing isn’t that different from what ancient people did, just because we’re using PVC pipe or Arduinos. I think all of our texts talked about the “human nature” of making at some point or another. I really felt like these two sites were a great example of that, and made me feel like my Making was part of the human experience, and not just a part of a class. A great trip, all around.

Already making adjustments

I suppose this is pretty common in Making, isn’t it? I took my husband to Menard’s over the weekend to shop around for parts and get his input in this Marble Maze Cube project. I have been describing it to him and we researched some articles, Instructables, and YouTube videos on working with acrylic over the weekend so we were just trying to get a feel for cost and the next steps. (FYI, I probably won’t actually start making this project for another week or so, we are going to go use the shop at his work to avoid having to purchase some specialized equipment – nothing fancy, but nothing that we see ourselves needing ever again, either.)

Within about 3 minutes of looking at acrylic I realized that I was going to have to make some changes and adjustments. Acrylic isn’t terribly expensive, unless you need a lot of it – then the prices add up fast! We realized that with my current plan we would be spending over $150 on acrylic sheets and end up wasting anywhere from 1/3 to 1/2 of it anyway. But this is why I’m having Paul help me. Because he immediately noticed that if we made a 15″x15″ cube instead of an 18″x18″ cube we could cut the cost of the acrylic down to $40 and have virtually no waste at all. So that’s what we’re planning on doing. It may mean that my maze on the interior is smaller and less complex, but maybe that’s a good thing considering it’s a first try. I’m still concerned with weight too, so a smaller cube with less maze might be a boon anyway. 

We also sat down and worked a rough plan for construction. I honestly don’t think this will take a lot of time, just a lot of careful work. Here’s our plan, any thoughts or advice – please share!!

1. Cut acrylic into squares, pre-drill terminals for marbles and holes needed for wall flanges for terminals. 

2. Glue 3 sides of the cube together, let set (it needs to cure for 24 hours.) Glue 2 sides onto the cube, let set.

3. Attach wall flanges, assemble maze inside (this will be a lot of trial and error and trying to get things to fit while also maximizing amount of variety…)

4. Glue last side onto cube. Let set. 

5. Test run on children – I work in a school district and I’m planning on crashing one of the summer day cares going on here. 

Follow-up to PVC pipe

Browsing Pinterest and I found this. I totally had this idea first.

The Project (oh god it’s happening…I can’t back out now.)

There’s quite a long story of how my project came into being (being in my mind at least.) 3 years ago I was working in a Pre K center teaching 4-5 year olds. Minnesota state law says that a child is considered a preschooler at 33 months but you can make a request for a child to be considered preschooler early. I was working in a center located inside the Best Buy headquarters so our clientele was mostly highly educated, upper class, *ahem* helicopter type parents. Which meant most of my kids had moved into preschool around 29-30 months. Which meant that they had been in preschool for nearly 3 years.

Because of this, I had started to notice something in my Pre K room. A lot of the kids were in a “play” rut. Meaning, they were playing the same thing, every day, with the same kids, and not really varying their play at all. While the curriculum we taught week to week and month to month changed, really the toys never did. That’s not to say we didn’t have a large variety of toys, but if you really study toys and examine them, you realize that a lot of toys are really quite similar in intended function, except usually one defining characteristic, such as articulating joints or wheels.

It seemed like the boys especially were stuck – I was seeing Lego firetrucks, and K’nex firetrucks, and block firetrucks, and drawings of firetrucks, and Magna Tile firetrucks, and pretend firetrucks. My boys were in a firetruck rut. I wanted to shake things up, but I needed to do so quickly and with almost no money.

I will admit here, that I have always personally felt that this was one of my strokes of brilliance in my life. I went to Home Depot and bought 20 feet of 1 ½ inch white PVC pipe and about 20 different snap-on fittings. I think I spent less than $35. I had my husband cut the PVC pipe into varying lengths. (Sidebar – never ask a concrete sequential person to randomize something – “But exactly how long do you want them?” “I DON’T CARE!!” for about 2 hours until you finally get annoyed and make a bunch of random sharpie marks on the pipe. “THERE. CUT THOSE.”)

Then I put all the pipes and fittings in a big plastic box with a handful of marbles and watched.

My boys were immediately transfixed, enamored, and engrossed. I watched them for days experiment with tilting the pipes, turning them, trying new fittings, adjusting things, and tinkering with the pipes for hours trying to find the ways that made the marbles go faster, slower, get stuck, or seemingly disappear. They realized quickly that a greater angle meant faster exits from the marbles. Sometimes they would pick up the whole thing and shake it to get results.  All without me having to do a “lesson” on any of these topics. A lot of girls got involved with the boys too which was HUGE!! I noticed a few things then, and in retrospect I’ve realized some others:

1. It is impossible to fail at building a marble run with standard marble run toys. Okay, that’s not true, but those sets are designed to be successful because it doesn’t look good when the marble run doesn’t work. If you can snap pieces together you’re almost guaranteed that the run will work.
2. The kids LIKED not knowing exactly where the marble was coming out and LIKED trying to create a structure that they could predict. For them, failure was okay and they didn’t get discouraged, they just altered the structure.                       
3. The kids LIKED having complete control over the run and how it operated.

So at the time I had started to roll around ideas in my head of how to push this new game to the next level and that’s when the project I am making began. I wanted to create the same kind of experimentation and exploration I had with the original marble run, but with more focus on the science side of it than the building. I wanted the kids experimenting more with cause and effect and less with “trying to get the marble to shoot out as fast as humanly possible to knock over something or roll under a table and be lost forever.”

But inevitably I got busy with 6 million other things, switched jobs, and never had a reason to pursue my plan, until now. What I had wanted to create was something of a “Mystery Marble Maze.” My basic plan was that I would build an entire complex clear marble maze and essentially insert the entire thing in a clear box with only the terminals for the marbles accessible. In theory, a child could drop a marble into a hole in the box and have to manipulate the box itself to get the marble to come out where they intended. I want to include splitters in the interior so a kid could drop a marble into one hole and get different results each time. I want to create a structure that has to be manipulated – rolled, tilted, lifted, shaken – to get results, because kids respond better to non-static items (a static item would be something such as repeatedly dropping a marble into the top of a standard marble run.)

At this time my rough plan is to build a  acrylic 18” cube with 5-9 holes on each side. Inside the box will be clear plastic tubing connecting holes in a variety of ways using PVC fittings. There are some issues I foresee already:

1. Weight – if I’m expecting kids to manipulate this box, I can’t make it too heavy. There were some really interesting brass fittings at Home Depot but they were so heavy I didn’t even consider them.
2. Tubing – I was planning on using plain clear plastic vinyl tubing, but I’m worried that if the tubes bend and crease while in the box, it will prevent marbles from rolling freely through them.
3. Connecting tubing to the box from the inside. I want this to be as neat as possible, so I’m trying to think of a good way to connect the tubing to the box without necessarily slopping glue all over. There are fittings but I’m going to have to order them online, I think.
4. General construction – the last time I sawed anything was probably my 8th grade wood shop class. So I’ve given my husband a stern lecture on letting me use his tools and just supervising and offering guidance. I’m still nervous.

I’m going to Home Depot and Axe Man (UGH) tonight to start buying materials and working out a plan….fingers crossed!

Quick tip for parents/teachers – I found tons of uses for the PVC pipe set later. Water table, sand toys, play-doh rollers/cutters, it was a $35 well spent.

Which Came First – the Maker or the Project?

It was my husband’s birthday this Sunday, and being a good wife, I asked him what he wanted to do for the day. And then I heard the words I have learned to dread, “Can we go to Axe Man?” Ugh. It’s not that I have anything against Axe Man per se, I just get so overwhelmed in that store. While Paul loves to wander up and down the aisles and fiddle with the little gears, levers and switches, I feel like I should have the spark of creativity, I should be thinking of really cool projects to do with all the cool stuff in there.  I see piles of brand new empty CD cases and think, “there’s gotta be a way to re-purpose those,” but the spark never comes and I inevitably end up asking for the keys and waiting in the car. I’ve been with Paul for 10 years, and we’ve been going to Axe Man for 10 years, and I have always felt this way.

Surprising (or not so much since I’m taking this class…) it got me wondering about which came first – the maker or the project? If I’m wandering up and down the aisles at Axe Man, hopelessly at a loss for what to do, but wanting to think of something, does that make me a Maker? Paul nevers really tinkers, when he makes a project, he carefully researches it, finds plans that will work for him, purchases the parts, and makes it exactly the way the plan specifies. And once he is done with a project, he doesn’t really explore much else. So does his project make him a Maker?

The books and what we’ve discussed all tend to say that it’s both – Makers are in the eye of the beholder. But I think my own experience of not really knowing where to start, and Paul’s experience of needing the path clearly laid out for him, are important things to keep in mind while building a Makerspace. All patrons are going to come to the table with different needs, and you can’t just assume everyone knows how to make their projects a reality.