Christchurch Tram - 2016

My inspiration for designing this Tram come from a project that was successful on Kickstarter's campaign. The project is about using a laser cutter to cut out a beautiful wooden book cover from plywood or bamboo. The book covers were designed on the computer, and then they were cut and engraved by a laser cutter. Their work admired me a lot, and suddenly, an idea came to me "why don't I try to make a 3D laser cut model from plywood". I was so excited about this idea and started to do it immediately. I think if I can add mechanical structure on the tram to produce motion it would make it more interested to play. Moreover, the model should be like 3D puzzles so that people would be more excited to assemble the model.

It took me a while to find what design should I come up. It should be some things that most people enjoy to look at, something that can be used for decorating their house. One day, a friend of my posted a photo on Facebook of her beside a tram, and this gave me the answer, I will design the Christchurch Tram.

The first prototype came out after three months. Thanks for computer aided design software, the designing process become must easier. Some picture of the first prototype is shown below.

Every detail of the Tram was considered and design carefully both inside and outside look.

Getting ready for the product to be able to cut by laser cutter was also a challenge for me as well. Every part of the tram has to be drawn again on 2D CAD files so that the laser cutter can read the data. Cost is also the primary consideration. If my design has too many details, it will take more time for the laser cutter to cut, then the cost will be increased. Therefore, to reduce the cutting cost, I have to go back to my design and try to simplify and remove any unnecessary details on the tram.

I was very excited and worked hard to finish the cutting files. However, when I sent the files to cut, the cutting did not happen! The laser cutter was unable to read my files due to some errors. Therefore, this problem took me even more several days in stressful to find out the reasons of these errors. I did a lot of research, then try and fail, and just keep going until I found out that the drawing of the gears caused the problem. Because the gears contain so many details, so when I convert the gear files from Inventor software to AutoCAD, this created many errors. If I zoom in maximum the 2D CAD files of the gears, I will see most of the line are not connected to each other which is unable to recognize before. I fixed those problems, and then it worked without any errors.

The Tram was cut and shown below.

The first prototype:

When I the first prototype was cut and assembled, I realized that the wooden engine of the tram does not work like desires. Therefore, I come up with a second design.

After a few weeks, the second design finished with an alternative type of engine. Detail of the new model is shown below.

The same thing happens to the second prototype, the engine still not working. Time run out and lack of money, so I decided to stop working with the engine temporally. Instead, I focus on improving the appearance of the Tram.

The third design of the tram is shown below: