assembly

We’ve been at school this week and the P6 and 7s have been working very hard to get everything assembled and ready for when the metal rings arrive.

 

cable tying cups together

drilling holes to hang the pencils

377 pencils

 

the ruler layer

Getting the parts

Florence has been very busy collecting some of the many parts we need to build the chandelier, as we hope the school has too.

We have now bought all the lighting components (parts)a and the hundreds of ties that we need and are ordering some of the harder to find objects to put on the chandelier.

Everyone is collecting water cooler cups, pencils, old clear lightbulbs, coat hanger and Barr’s bottles, and we will be in school on Monday to help produce the drawings for the bottom layer of the chandelier.

The coat hangers are for making a special clip for holding the lightbulbs in place, which I shall try and photogrpah to put up here. As I was looking for old coat hangers I came across this intriguing picture:

If we get too many coat hangers maybe we can make one of these!

Engineering Drawings

This week has been about engineering drawing: The drawings are now ready to go to the fabricators, we are just waiting to get them checked by our engineer. Its important to get a second opinion on technical drawings as they contain all the information needed to make the chandelier and any mistakes in them might result in the chandelier being made incorrectly.

The engineering drawing for the top part of the chandelier, the King Ring

Above is one of the engineering drawings. It shows the top part of the chandelier, the King Ring, from above and from the side and also shows close up views of the more detailed parts. There are lots of measurements (dimensions) indicating the sizes of different parts, and notes with further instructions to the fabricator on how we would like the part to be constructed. The text ‘Not for Manufacture’ will be removed when the drawing is approved and handed over to the fabricator – drawings go through lots of revisions (versions) before being finished!

The nice thing about using a local fabricator is that we can go and speak to them in person in case there are any unclear parts of the drawing.

Calculations

Following our meeting with McMillans we have been checking what thickness of cable will be required to hang the chandelier. To do this we’ve been using the computer model to calculate the weights of all the parts, and then using a bit of maths we can calculate how strong the cables have to be. This will then tell us how thick the cables have to be as thicker the cable, the stronger it is.

To be safe we make sure we ask for cables that will be at least 2 times stronger than the calculations tell us they need to be.

Meeting McMillans

Today we met with McMillans who are going to make all the structure in aluminium.  We’ve also ordered all the light fittings and bought a lot of cable ties!  Here’s the latest CAD image of how it’s looking.  You can see we’ve turned the bottles upside down so that they can all sit on rods coming out of the top ring.