Jascha Wilcox

Kinda Möbius

Sun, 10 Sep 2023 14:54:11 +0000

This is a piece I completed a number of years back in school that I have wanted to write up retroactively...

Ever since my childhood realization that the process of welding was used to create objects of immense strength and scale, I had long aspired to acquire both a working knowledge of and manual skill in the process. Most welding performed today is some variant of electric arc welding, which is itself an inherently captivating intersection of electrical and physical phenomena. Arc welding is also particularly interesting in the way that it was so immensely advanced compared to the joining process it replaced in the early 20th century — hot rivets. If plastic injection molding was a zero to one event in consumer product manufacturing, arc welding would be the metal fabrication counterpart in industries such as shipbuilding and pipelines.

Moped Coat Rack

Thu, 18 Jul 2019 19:52:00 +0000

A while ago I came across an unending supply of damaged brake levers generated through the routine maintenance of a moped fleet. It is very often that I must remind myself and my colleagues that every single physical object is unique, despite the impressive precision of modern manufacturing. Just like snowflakes, the unique variance between copies of manufactured objects are often below the levels of unassisted human perception. These levers caught my eye as each had become conspicuously unique, as if their existing variances and imperfections had been amplified. They looked like something one would encounter in an engineering simulation, or under the scrutiny of a precision measurement tool. Of course, the form each lever took was primarily a function of the random abuse it encountered (primarily people accidentally tipping mopeds over with the handles taking the impact) and not existing imperfections.

Chocolate Petzl

Fri, 12 Apr 2019 12:00:44 +0000

A friend of mine bought a desktop thermoforming machine and let me borrow it.

When I got it there seemed to be some alignment issues with the material frame, a little tune up and lube seemed to sort it out.

I immediately grabbed a couple interesting objects around the house to pull a test form. The first sheet actually went surprisingly well, not a bad little machine!

Stained Glass Crane

Mon, 08 Apr 2019 00:35:35 +0000

A friend of mine expressed interest in working on a stained glass project. Out of the various mediums of glasswork this was the one for which I was least suspecting to come across a collaborator. To my surprise, there was a particularly pleasant local vendor for any and all materials and tools required for the craft.

Greetings

Definitely starting with the discount glass

Wow

In accordance with my paper crane new medium “hello world” policy, which I have used in other projects, I settled on a projection of a paper crane. As this was my first stained glass piece, I aimed to minimize the number of distinct pieces of glass as well as any concave areas or curves. This allowed the project to commence without any special tools besides a scoring wheel (ie. no diamond grinder).

Neon Crane

Wed, 04 Oct 2017 20:01:57 +0000

I started knowing absolutely nothing about the neon manufacturing process, beyond the equipment I could imagine would be involved to to fill the tube with a specific atmosphere. I won’t get into specifics of the entire process here, as it is very involved and there are various other resources that cover this. Maybe it deserves a more in-technical post another time if I get back into the studio again.

The principle process step in the creation of neon artwork is hand-bending glass tube. As far as I am aware, bending of neon was exclusively manual throughout the entire period of adoption and was never afforded any enduring efforts to automate. I cannot underscore how deceptively challenging it is to bend glass tube into a desired form, or at least to do so with any level of repeatability. Not only does the bending process demand full real-time attention, but both hands must be coordinated together in free space along with pressure from your mouth (back-pressure is applied from a mouthpiece to prevent collapse). Once you can bend the glass, it becomes apparent how critical planning the order of each bend is to do anything modestly complicated (yes this is the neon Design For ~~Manufacturing~~ Bending process). Planning around intersections/collisions of the glass tube is elementary but figuring out how to heat the specifically desired section of tube in tight spaces requires intuition only gained through experience.