Lily Lee Final Project Unrulr
Final Project: DVD trashcan
I really could not think of what to do for the longest time, then I remembered I really needed a little trashcan in my car and I decided to design my own. This trashcan will be mainly based on an early 2000s DVD player with the DVD slot being where trash goes. This specific style of technology was known as Y2K Futurism and specifically Y2K chromecore.
This style as known for having metallic looking technology, with a sleek gray chromatic texture. Here is a link to a detailed breakdown of the aesthetic
https://aesthetics.fandom.com/wiki/Chromecore
The 3 ways I am going to incorporate this aesthetic is through:
1. Color: I plan to print this in the chromecore gray color. Matching the specific color an style of everything in this aesthetic
2. Materials: The material for almost all of these were plastic that were made to look a little like metal, since I will be 3D printing this I will create this look using the plastic filament
3. The design: Since this will be modeled with a specific product in mind the whole finished item will be referencing this product inside of the aesthetic
This project will be modeled using CAD, I am not exactly sure what program I will utilize yet. Either Sketchup or Vectorworks, the model will be 3D printed on my printer
This was mainly just me modeling in Vectorworks, I am still very new to this software and have mainly only used it for stage design so there was a lot of just getting more comfortable with the software. I ended up modeling the basics of the design in a very boxy layout and then decided to print a micro model. I wanted to test out how well Vectorworks file printed as well as get an idea of how my design was going to look.
After looking over my small model I realized that my current connector being used to hold the top and bottom on was way to small, so I went back and revised it, which took a long time since I could not figure out how to adjust the original one. Then I moved onto rounding my model, another thing I ended up really struggling with. I don’t have a ton of experience with Vectorworks 3D tools so it took me some time to figure out how to get what I wanted.
Finally I purchased some gray filament because bright orange doesn’t really work for this project.
This is where everything seemed to go sideways, everything I printed was sort of crooked and messed up and would not fit. So I spent hours sanding and adjusting to try and get everything to fit correctly. Every time I tried to attach the two top pieces they would come apart eventually. I realized they weren’t completely flush with the bottom so instead of sanding which seemed to be making no difference whatsover I used scissors. Amazingly this actually kind of worked. The scissors managed to actually take a good chunk out of the print so I was finally able to attach it. I had tried like 30 different ways of attaching the lid and even trying to melt a hole in the 3D print and insert little rods like in an ikea build but that didn’t work either.
Finally it was holding ish, and at this point I was exhausted and super angry and ready to throw this thing away. I normally have really good luck with hot glue guns because they melt the plastic and can usually weld two pieces of the print together, but for some reason it just was not cooperating, everything I tried to do to smooth out the glue and make it look better kept making it look worse and worse and worse. Finally I gave up, there was a good chance if I continued going I was either going to completely break what I had built and/or burned myself pretty badly.
I added a part for the hinge, I had printed about 30 different variations of the hinge and none of them worked. Some had potential but my printer is not great with really small items and most were coming out extremely warped. The other issue was once again the glue, nothing was holding no matter how hard I tried. Finally I gave up, truly it felt like nothing was going right when finishing this.
The other thing that has kind of annoyed me in the finished product (besides the terrible glue marks) is that it looks like it took me no time to complete. I spent so long on this and it just doesn’t look great. Which hurts, I tried so hard and I am just not a fan of the final result. This happens a lot with work but it still sucks.
