Here is the SLC intro If you haven’t yet checked it out:
The Blue sky project was probably the biggest project at the exhibition night and was mostly what the night was all about. We had to come up with an idea or something where we could invent or improve upon something to answer a “How Might We” question. My question was “How Might We Find a Way to Create a Storage Box That Can Fit in Different Spaces?” To answer this question I came up with a few designs on a drawing app on my iPad called Paper 53.
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- First draft
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- Second draft
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- Third draft
At first I thought this was going to be a very easy project as I came up with a simple design and could quickly design it but that wasn’t the case. This project included a lot of trial and error throughout the building process which wasn’t always easy.
I started out first with some hard cardboard and tried to make it out of that but it didn’t really work as it was too fragile and I couldn’t get the stability of sliding that my box has now.
When the foam didn’t work, I decided to try wood, first I used this wood with holes in it which was hard to use as I had to cut very precise pieces. I then used thin wood with no holes to cut out 6 13″ by 9″ pieces of wood without holes to make the frame.
After making the frame I cut four little pieces of wood to go at the inside corners for screws to make the design stronger. Then I used dresser runners on the side to make it very easy to extend. At this point I thought I was practically done, all I had to do was make a base for the box right? Wrong this was definitely the hardest part of the project trying to get it to be extendable but still stable. I first decided to make long strips of wood and fabric pockets for each of the pieces of wood. This didn’t work as well as I thought it would because every time I tried to use the wood in the box they would be pushed out in a weird way. After this bump in the road I had to problem solve and I decided to use wire in the fabric pockets to keep the bottom from flopping down. I then used Velcro to secure the bottom to it.
Then I finally was done my expandable box. Some things I feel could have changed or improved are the runners for the dressers only go on one side which makes it really hard to put it on both sides and also I would make the three sided box that goes on the outside a little bigger.
Here is a video of how the storage box works:
Here are my other two SLCs blog posts check them out!