Evaluation

I have really loved this project. Since i started at the university by no fault of its own they really channel you into a path they would like you to make in. This project felt like the first real stab at life outside this place where i could write and make whatever i want to make.

I became very process oriented to start and i think this might have lead me to have a severe lack of photos of things in the real world i like. It seems i latched on to this one process and i stuck with it through out the entire project, as much as i do love it and it has given me several different avenues to go down i didn't explore much else. 

The photos below show that i wasn't lazy with my experimenting and tried a number of different ways at looking at squishing the steel but that is all i did. If it wasn't going under a power hammer this project i wasn't doing it.

From the get go with squishing things i had a lot of people telling me that it had been done a hundred times over and i had to agree. It is nothing to put a piece of metal under the hammer and upsetting it down so i had to fine a unique way i went about it. I tried cutting it with the grinder, punching top tools into it even working more than one side with the hammer but all weren't really going with what i wanted to do with them. I had this idea of a really nice table in my head and i was shoehorning the squishes to suit so to speak. 

The turning point for me is when i started making up the legs, two different sizes of squishes side by side was so sexy.

The photo above is the first finished sample that i got down. This is a little crude but with some refining i knew that i could get it to be what i wanted. So with more sampling on the legs going in and more with the feet i had a finished product in mind.

My finished piece was done a lot faster than other people which was a little confidence boost but then seeing the scope of some peoples work i soon had a reality check. Four legs is nothing to a full gate so maybe i was playing it a little safe this term and could have strived for another finished table. 

I would have liked to have seen mine fully finished but the massive mess about which sorting a table top out here was too much. Every carpenter i rang was acting like i was the idiot for asking them to work in wood and drill some holes. First guy i phone in Yorkshire admittedly a friend of mine says fine i can do that easy so il get it done up north. 

There is no finish on the steel yet either because i am uncertain on what kind of wood i will be using. Hoping for oak but it might be something a different color so don't want to rush a finish on that doesn't match. I had imagined some gun bolt blue on the legs to go with the earthy color of the tabletop but now i am thinking maybe a good beeswax finish.

Overall i am happy how the legs looked when finished. I did worry they would be too spindly but i think it suits just right for what i was after. On the much thicker table top it will feel really like the top is crushing the legs making this compression on the steel.

If there is one thing i was super happy about during this project was the squished wing nuts. They are such a cool little feature that i hope to use on a lot of different projects. As i bolt on the end of some threaded bar they are so much nicer than the alternative.

I think they are the biggest thing i will take out of this project into my career. A real stroke of genius in the eleventh hour so to speak. 

I think i lacked a few things in this project but all and all i enjoyed it and made some nice stuff so isnt that what really matters on the grand scale. I am taking all this research and design choices straight into my next project where i am going bigger than i did this time. I am thinking either giant mirror or giant table either way its going to be giant.