ron resch

 

Have you ever learned about something and wonder... "why haven't I seen this or been told about this before this point in my life?". Well today I stumbled onto information about artist, designer, architect, computer scientist, Ron Resch. 

The video Paper and Stick above is stellar. He received his B.A. and M.F.A. from the University of Iowa in the mid sixties and later to went on to teach at the University of Illinois-UC (Art and Computer Science) and later the University of Iowa (Computer Science) and Boston University (Computer Science). He later did consulting work and worked with NASA and on Star Trek the Motion Picture. What a career!

The egg he built above was a major undertaking. As the end of the film denotes, he started developing some of his calculations via computer. The feedback that he got from each development in his work and how he later applies it blows me away. He was so steady in his pursuit and again I assume this lead to the computer science gigs as a result of continuing to develop his work via computer. 

Think about this... this is the beginning of algorithmic computer based design at this time. It gets better though...He modified a plotter to score and cut sheets of aluminum for the giant egg. Yes, that's right he modified/built a custom CNC machine to digitally fabricate the egg in 1975. The list of experts on his website and what they say about him is impressive.

I know there are many people folding paper and much research at MIT being done on the topic. I also know this was the basis of a lot of the early design work I was taught in college. The Bauhaus work was obviously a big influence of the Foundations program I went through. I also know a lot of Buckminster Fuller's work was influential to my Foundations education probably due to proximity of SIU-C to where I grew up and attended college. It's just interesting that this seems to be the "missing link" between my early education and my interests in technology, tools, craft, architecture, design, art , and digital fabrication. Well, this was just too good to not post about. Fascinating!! Ron Resch was the real deal!

mini CNC routers/mills

I got a late start today in the shop. I's still working on the necklace for the cameo project, but I stayed up until 3am the night before getting the CAM ready for it. I also wrote CAM for the match boxes so I'm excited to go into mini production run mode on those. Today I started the necklace milling and while that job was running, I started work on a mini CNC router that I'm building for when I teach workshops on CNC and need to travel. This CNC is built with 3D printed parts and basic hardware. It's a simple little machine that will be good for milling foam and plastic molds and parts. I did decide to put an aluminum plate bed on it. It should turn this thing into a little tank. As I was making it I was thinking that most of the printed parts could/should be built in metal. 

Anyway as I was making this one, I started scrounging for some parts and came across a bunch of linear motion parts that I had along with some aluminum extrusion. I decided to start making an even smaller but super heavy duty version of my larger CNC router table but completely out of metal and with NEMA 23 steppers. I already have a Gecko G540  box to run it and I even have some ball screws that I can incorporate. The last picture is a teaser photo of the spoil board for the heavy duty CNC. I decided to give it a grab handle for carrying vertically. Stay tuned for more pics of these machines as they come together.

Again, it feels really good to just be doing manual layout and building on the fly. I'll CNC mill the parts I need to, but for now this allows me to build while my CNC cuts other things.