Hello all my fine friends.  We’ve been hard at work fabricating the chamber of The Neuron Chamber and I’ve got some photos to prove it.

For this piece, since it was so exquisitely designed in Solidworks and we are on a tight time line I’ve had a majority of the components water jet cut.

One consequence of going form extremely low tolerance CAD work right to extremely low tolerance CNC (ie water jet cutting) cutting is that all of the fabrication on my end needs to be in a similarly low tolerance range.  That means that all of these parts that I am getting from the waterjet cutter need to be put together very precisely or none of it will fit together very well in the end.

However the end result of all this fussy work is a seriously tight look that should contrast well with the organic neuron sculptures.

So, let’s see some pictuers:

One of the first elements I needed to put together are the vertex bars that make the faces of the pentagon chamber.

Here you can see the long flat bar that faces the inside of the chamber.

Next, using a custom jig I had waterjet cut, we attached the the two angled flat bars that define the planar faces of the chamber.  Here is a photo of the jig — which will set the next two pieces at a precise 108 angle

Here are the two bars resting on the jig waiting to be tacked together.

Here are the five fully assembled vertex bars and close up of the access port holes.  All those little holes will be tapped for 5/16 bolts.  Perhaps now you can start to see what I mean about how fussy this things is.

Next you can see how these five vertex bars join up with the pentagons to almost fully define the chamber.

finally,  Each of those 1″ holes needed to be drilled out because although they were cut to be 1″ when at a 108 angle the thickness of the material actually makes all the angled holes about 1/8″ too small.

This was a huge pain in the ass and this one photo does not convey all that went into getting these holes drilled out.  And now that they are a crips 1″ we’ll still need to open them up by ~1/16″ more becase the steel tubes that go into these holes are really 1.06″ .  sigh.