So on the Saturday after the Academic writing course, 3 team members met up, the fourth had work. - I never thought I'd envy someone who had a weekend job, how things change.

The plan was to work in Solid Works and build different parts of the rig, though I wasn't sure how easy this would be. We discussed a couple of issues first though. One was whether we could in fact capture infra red footage. Examples that our team mate had found on the net of DIY Infra Red capture just didn't look that interesting. They really looked like pure Black and White rather than heat capture when inspecting the image closely. I hadn't been able to test the cameras yet and did not have the materials required. Also someone in our team had discussed the ideas with family members, and they found it difficult to relate our thermal imaging with the grouping of people and wondered what the point of it all was, which then lead her to not quite believe in the idea so much either.

Seeing as this was possibly our most conceptually aware person not really believing in the idea and the fact that we had no real way at that point in time of determining that what we wanted to do was technically possible without spending a lot of money to get decent results (our research into DIY thermal imaging was not inspiring), we decided to discuss other possible ideas again. It seemed a bit late to be doing this but if we could come up with something better and easier to execute then it was possibly worth it.

After some discussion we bought back the idea of reversing the brief and capturing slightly compromised footage and relying on the audio capture more. One camera pointing skyward and one to the ground. We drew up a little trolley that one could push along that had both camera's mounted to it.

Once we had done this our CAD operator insisted that this would be easy enough for her to draw on her own and we all went our separate ways. I lamented the loss of the original camera rig that I was looking forward to building but it wasn't such a big deal.

On Tuesday we had a printed copy of the plans, there were some details missing but this didn't bother me personally as I felt I was probably going to wind up altering things during production anyway. The idea that one can plan something entirely in Solid Works first is all well and good but it didn't strike me as practical for our group when we'd known the application for less than 2 weeks and our CAD operator has never studied engineering, but I've been building things all my life and had often not worked from detailed plans but from in my head. I like the proper workflow, but it just wasn't going to happen here. The plans were bounced back from the 3D lab with a few comments and so we had to address them. I got out my visual diary and re-drew the plans with added dimensions that would be needed. The second round, we also had the benefit of a Tricycle that we were taking the wheels from. Our CAD operator had found it on Trademe for $5 but had not been able to measure it when making the drawings because it had yet to be picked up.

We resubmitted the plans on Wednesday and there were still minor issues but we were given the go-ahead to work in the 3D lab. When we got there we discovered that one material specified in the plans did not exist as stock (20mm round tubing) so we went back and discussed the options. One option was to replace it with square tubing, but our conceptual group member (AKA CAD operator) had issues with that as over the past couple of days we'd built a  concept up and she didn't feel that square tubing fit with the whole theme. I wasn't sure it really mattered too much myself, mainly because I didn't want to go and pay for round tubing when we had perfectly good square tube for free. However our Assistant Fabricator had a solution, her mother worked in a steel mill and she was able to get about 4m of 20mm round tubing for nothing. We just had to wait a day.

On Thursday The Fabricator (me) and the Fab Assistant came in at 9am when the 3D lab opened, hoping to beat everyone else in the class as it could get rather packed. We also did this on Friday. It took 2 full days to do most of the fabrication. I found the process a bit painful. The Lab was full most of that time with the other BCT students and much of the time was spent waiting to use different machines. If the lab had been empty I think I could have churned out the trolley in half a day. And at much better quality. I'd told my team that I could build anything they threw at me and basically talked myself up a bit as that seems to be the modus operandi to get people to have confidence in you (which I find very painful to do as there is a huge gulf between those that say they can and those that actually can yet big talkers always seem to win). When in the lab this made me change my behaviour a little bit for the benefit of onlookers. It's difficult to explain but I guess my normal approach would be to build something (and get it right) in ways that onlookers might flip out over because it would look like I was too gung ho. Because I was in a controlled environment I was more methodical and second-guessing my normal approach. I don't feel that this made me any better but actually worse. There are a couple of parts in particular that don't look like the work of someone who knows how to build things. We reinvented the frame as we went mainly for extra strength and it might have been handy to have a large piece of paper to plan it on at 1:1 scale to use as a template, but we wound up doing it by eye so it's not perfectly square. That said, the result works. The front wheel is a bit wonky but I'm not sure it's noticeable to most casual observers. The wonky nature is a result of being interrupted 3 times while trying to wield it together. Well maybe I'd have messed it up anyway, but interruptions really didn't help much.

Oh yeah, special mention to my co-fabricator, she was both skilled and great to work with. A++ would trade again.