A typical working week at the Fablab starts on Monday at ten o’ clock. The Fablab is closed for the public today and is used for building Waag projects. I discuss the coming week with Alex Schaub (the lab manager) and we divide tasks. I take advantage of the quietness in the lab on closed days to design the ‘guts’, internals of the Popup project, in Illustrator. The idea is to design an inner casing to hold all of the electrical components of the project. The final design will be cut out of plexiglass, but I use cheap cardboard that I laser according to the Illustrator design to check clearances. My day ends around six/seven o’ clock when I head to the central station and take the train back to Eindhoven.

On Tuesday the lab is open from ten o’ clock and as discussed yesterday with Alex I will help the people that reserved the machines today. A group of fashion design students is in and they want to experiment with the laser cutter and different fabrics. I show them how to control the machine and explain how they have to format the Illustrator drawings they’ve made so they can start cutting the fabric. After I’ve shown them the whole process from drawing to finished product I leave them to their work, let them set up the machine themselves the second time, check all settings before they start cutting and from then on they can use the machine themselves. In the afternoon I discuss the open license on which the Fablab thrives and possible opportunities for the future of manufacturing with some curious visitors that dropped in.

On Wednesday the lab is closed for public again and I’ve been asked by a colleague to casts some Scotties (a communication device for parents and children) in PU. I’ve never done this before but my colleague has documented how she casts them on the Fablab website. The documentation describes the process of preparing and preheating the molds, details of mixing ratios to get the right structure and color and descriptions on the time it takes for the material to set. The website with over 200 documented projects is a very useful resource to redo what people did before without having to do extensive research.

On Thursday the lab is open again and I’m helping someone with the milling machine. I don’t have that much experience with this machine yet, but the tutorials help us to prepare the 3D model properly. With some help of Mike Pelletier, a colleague that has a lot of experience with the milling machine, we setup up the machine. Three hours later the model is finished, in the mean time I check if everybody is making progress and talk with visitors about their and my interests.

Friday is a quiet day again, Alex has the day off and I’m alone at the Fablab. I use this day to finish a report on technologies that can be used to built final designs of concepts that were developed during a prototyping workshop with and for the Vrije Universiteit (VU). In the afternoon I meet with Bas (my company coach) to reflect on the last week and decide what I will be working on the next week.

This post is tagged internship, Week @ Fablab