This hands-on Workshop explores design, fabrication, and assembly of toy products for the DIY community. We've designed, fabricated, and assembled toy cars consisting of functional mechanical assemblies of multiple parts (wheels, chassis, gears, differential gears, shell, etc.) with specific functional requirements (e.g. wheels must rotate, parts must snap-fit, etc.). Toys must be designed for laser cutting fabrication and easy manual assembly with no adhesives or fasteners. We've explored flexure joints and Designed For Assembly (DFA) techniques to easily install parts. Depending on available time and resources, we created different parts with just one material from wheels to spring with Derlin, for the purpose of having a car that works.

We must develop (design, CAD model, and fabricate) a part or subassembly, resolving how their parts/subassemblies will interlock. We must negotiate what we can design, design what we can model, model what we can fabricate, and fabricate what that we can assemble.

This six weeks workshop taught me a great amount of knowledge, and I have the responsibility of research assistantship in this course. If you are interested you can see all of our projects with their process here.