Dr Bokana's Blog 3: We made a Fighter Jet

Week 5, Lesson 1

This weeks lesson was a little bit boring yet interesting. We were suddenly told to do practice sketches, as a student who used to effortlessly fail his art exam, it felt like a burden to even think of drawing. Initially Mr Chua had us draw 2 points and connect the dots to make a line, at first I was like 'AIYA wack oni, this one confirm waste time', and as per my prediction the next thing we had to sketch were curves. 

After sketching a few more boring and lame circle and ovals, he suddenly showed us a photo of a building and asked us to draw it. After proclaiming that I am a failure in art, I am sure everyone wants to see my drawing us right??? EH I DONT CARE if you want to see anot. All my beloved readers are going to embrace my artistic talents and appreciate it.   

I know the lines aren't straight but bare with me okay 😢😭, Drawing a straight line may be easy but connecting 2 points to form a line is a whole different story LOL. 

Next we have my beautiful curves, or as I like to call them Parabolas. A well known mathematical curve drawn to represent the wonderful quadratic equation. IF Y'ALL DON'T KNOW WHATS quadratic equation is, please go back to primary school (As mentioned by Dr Lee Fook Choon)

Okay the concept behind, drawing these curves was to plot 3 dots and align the dots to form a curve, like the previous one a could not even draw a single straight curve. But you know what, I shall block all the haters out and console myself by saying that it's the effort that counts ;>>

After curves we had to draw circles, OH MY LEH BRO. Imagine if I cannot even draw a curve properly how am I supposed to draw a perfect circle 😮😮. PASS AWAY BRO

These circle were a little unorthodox to me, we had to draw 2 line and the circles had to be in between these circles. Reminded me somewhat of the primary school handwriting books, where the words had to perfectly fit in between the line. As you all can tell, I had not done a great job with those books, leading to marvelous circles. Who am I kidding LOL, the circles do not even resemble circles. SOME even 'leak' out of the lines.

Lastly, we had to draw ovals. To be honest, this was the easiest part. Cause oval can come in different sizes and errors in the drawing will not seem so obvious compared to circles.

Not going to lie, before I uploaded this image. I was praying that it would not be so bad but as y'all can tell it is definitely eye cancer and I hope yall enjoyed. PS there's more and I hope y'all have insurance incase anything happens while reading this blog. 

I turned to Jun Yi, a classmate of mine, and said 'the day I perfectly draw this is the day I get 4.0'. 4.0 referring to my grade point average for this semester. There is absolutely no way, I can even begin to draw this without years of practice. But end up, he meant it as a joke. The main reason he wanted to show us this photo is to teach us a concept called one-point perspective. 

A one-point perspective drawing means that the drawing a single vanishing point and it usually directly opposite to the viewer's eye. To give mercy on our lives, Mr chua instead told us to draw a one-point perspective of a milk carton. To be honest, I was ready to just sit there and do nothing. But seeing a noisy Abhishek doing nothing made Mr Chua Aware that, I was indeed not doing anymore and was just messing around with my buddies

I would like everyone to pause for a second and imagine the monstrosity I drew of a milk carton by relating back to the previous drawings.

Okay lah not so bad right, even Mr Chua gave me a 40%. 14 year old me would be proud that we could even get above 5%. I guess even an art illiterate like me can do well if I put my mind to it right 😁😁.

So we went through one-point perspective, now we had to do 2 point perspective. 2 point perspective, similar to one-point perspective, has 2 vanishing points. And you know what's the best part, he asked us to draw a whole house. I was like BOY AINT NO WAY BOY. I was ready to drop out already. MY LEH my heart gave put ISTG.

Imagine dei, how even. This teacher is expecting too much of me. BUT this again was another joke. Instead he wanted us to draw a book in a 2 point perspective. Bare with me, it is very bad but I tried 😢    

I know it is a miserable fail, and the words on the cover of the book may seem offensive to others, but I just want to make a statement saying that it was written for comedy purposes to make my peers laugh and no one was hurt in the act of my doing this. IT IS SO BAD I KNOW but it is okay, I will practice and try to improve.

So what is the point of learning these sketching methods?  To simple minded people like me they seem very useless and pointless.

 However, the point of learning one-point and 2-point perspective is to draw different point of view of a certain object, this allows us to visually understand and take not of features which we may not release when looking at the object itself. When these new features are realized, they open the door for product designer to better convey their idea and thoughts to their clients. And as chemical engineers, we are to door and sketch our chemical product design indifferent perspectives, to give others a rough idea of what our prototype is going to look like.

Just as I understood that, we were bombed with part 6 of our CA1, a manual sketch. As one of my groupmates Dylan was getting multiple praises from Mr Chua during the lesson, we appointed him to help do this section of our assessment. However, as we did not want to dump all the work onto him the rest of us decided that we will help him by providing him with the dimensions and also by gaving our input on how our design should look like.

Lesson 2

Typically, we only have 1 ICPD lesson per week and have 1 practical session every fortnight, but as the holidays are coming Mr Chua had decided to have a face-to-face lesson on Thursday. This second lesson was the interesting part, 3D modeling.

Before the class had begun, we were told to download an app called Autodesk Fusion 360. Kinda of exhausted that I had to come to school on day where there are no actual lesson, I bought a cup of our school's famous Thai Milk Tea from Food Court 2. The sugar content in the drink itself would keep me awake for hours.

To prevent any delay, Mr Chua decided to start the lesson immediately. Just straight into how make a keychain model using the app. However, my beloved friend called Sreenithi, had trouble installing the application. As our dear Sreenithi uses a apple MacBook, it was a little bit more complicated to download the software for her. Luckily, we had the class's Indian tech support aka me, Dr Bokana. After helping our Captain MacBook in her laptop issues, we went back to listening to what Mr Chua was teaching.

But you know what, we were too far behind. He had almost finished the keychain, thankfully captain MacBook and I were not the only ones who were clueless on what to do. So Mr Chua went around explain how to make the keychain and my friends such as Jun Yi and Jeevan were able to help me create the keychain. There were a few troubles I faced while making the keychain though, as the application is very graphics card intensive, laptops such as mine which consist of integrated graphics has troubles running the program without lag. And when I tried to save the design into a file, the app crashed causing me to lose all progress. KARMA for making fun of Captain MacBook, her MacBook is able to handle these high graphics related applications without trouble. Best part, even after helping her she turned around and laughed at me 😠😠.

To relax our minds, we were given a 15 mins break. And after the break we were briefed on the last section of our CA1, It was to design a photo frame as a group, and everyone had to take different section of the photo frame to design and lastly collate all of them to form a photo frame. Mr Chua took the liberty of teaching us how to produce the base of the photo frame and after learning that all the other parts seemed easy to do. It only required toying around with the software to find out how to make the other parts such as the clear glass on the photo frame.

CA1 CADD

Okay I know it looks simple, but frankly speaking it look me while to figure this back plate out. My group and I only started doing this part of our assessment 1 week after the class. So i forgot how to even begin, the only words in my mind were EXTRUDE as it was repeated a 1000 times during the lesson. But as u can see from the picture I did not even need to extrude anything.

    

Even though this looks simple, the difficult part of this project was working as a group. We decided as a group to do each part first then meet up to discuss what we need to edit or correct. But our over enthusiastic group forgot that we need the same measurements so that all the parts can fit well. We spent a good 2-3 hours debating on the correct length and finalised the the photo frame by sending all the parts to Yan Zhen for him to arrange them in order. 

FYI WE DID NOT FORCE HIM, it was because he laptop had a better graphics card compared to ours which allowed him to handle multiple parts at the same time.

Is it not gorgeous, the funny part is that at the end of our call for this discussion we realized deciding on the length at the start would have made completing this so much easier.

CA1 Manual Sketch 

As we were too exhausted from the CADD section, we decided to discuss the manual sketch another day. We had finalized on the idea of a filter for an air purifier which contained activated carbon and used coconut fiber as the filter material. 

Activated carbon uses the Chemical Engineering Principle of Adsorption. The harmful gas particles will attached themselves onto the activated carbon to filter our the air. Coconut fibers were used as a substitute for the typical fiberglass used to produce filters. This would allows for us to reduce on plastic wastage as coconut fiber when attached together properly tend to have a high filtration efficiency rate due to its dotted pattern.

A very simple but effective idea, that may actually impact the world. Even though the change is small and only is applicable for certain customers, this idea will likely attract consumer to purchase it as it is relatively cheap and easy to use. This prevent the customer from feeling any pain points as it is similar to the actual product.

This was our final sketch drawn by Dylan, our team carry. The drawing is fairly simple but our objective of this product is that the filter will be replaced instead of cleaned because of the activated carbon. One major issue we faced, once again, was the dimensions. The dimensions of the conventional filters had very small thicknesses. And as the thicknesses were normally small, with the addition of the activated carbon there will be an increase in thickness of the model. We took a rough estimate of how much space the activated carbon would take up. The usually thicknesses were around 2-3 cm, we added 5 cm to account for the addition. Making it seem bulky, but when measured 8 cm did not seem that drastic of a change.

                                                                                                                                                                      

Practical 2

Moving onto the fun bits of this week, we had our second practical. As other classes were a week ahead of us, we saw many chemical engineering classes carrying cardboard inventions. This made me super excited, I had even written down a few ideas to produce for the experiment. As every week our group members are selected randomly, I did not really have much time to share the idea with them. 

 Before this practical, we were told to do a pre-experiment to prepare us for this experiment. This pre-experiment was related to the types of cardboard and cardboards are typically made & categorized. We were provided with a article and had to perform a literature review on the it. 

I am sure many of us have seen the cross-section of a cardboard sheet. But I am also pretty sure that most of you all are not aware of the what these wavy things are.

These are called the flutes of the cardboard. However, these are not found is all types of cardboard, they are only found is corrugated cardboard sheets. These wave like structures actually provide the sheet with extra support and rigidity to the sheet allowing us to actually make structures and stable models using the material. And that there are actually multiple different grades of corrugated cardboards which have different thicknesses and strength used for different purposes. If any of y'all nerds are curious, you can visit the website on Corrugate Board Grades.

The main point I took away from the source was that, as you can see in the photo, there are indents in on the cardboard. These are so called named the 'grains' of the cardboard. When you try to bend or cut against the grains of the cardboard, it seems exponentially difficult compared when cutting or bending along the grains of the cardboard.

Moving onto the actual practical, we were told to make a structure using cardboard. But the twist is, we are supposed to use 6 different types of cardboard joineries. So what is a joinery?? Just as the word suggests, the joinery are used to join 2 sheets or cardboard together. There are many different types of joineries and these are some examples of them.

So for our actual invention, we spent a few minute thinking about what to make. We were thinking somewhere along the lines of a commercial airplane. Looking at different groups and their unique ideas, Mr Chua came to our group and gave us a recommendation. He suggested make the fighter jet F22, instead of a commercial one. Sounds very atas right?  Not only that a fighter jet is smaller and easier to make, as a typical fighter jet can hold 1 or 2 people. 

We started searching online for cardboard tutorials on how to make a fighter jet. and we somewhat too the final product of the tutorial and adapted the design as such that & joineries are in the design. While making our jet we had a few difficulties, initially we were not sure on how to even start making the plane. Like how are we even supposed to add in these joineries onto our plane. To begin with we were provided with a few items 

• Clear tape
• Masking tape 
• Double-sided tape 
• Penknives
• Scissors
• 50 cm ruler
• 100 cm ruler
• Cutting Plyer 
• Tacks
• Hole Puncher
• Cardboards 
• Skewers
• Glue
• Hot Glue gun

Not all the items had to be used but as we were already lacking on material, we tried our best to make use of most of them. The plane had 2 major components, the head and the body. Our 5 man group had spilt up into 2 groups. The first group consisting of Jeevan, my close buddy, and I. We were in charge of taking care of the smaller joineries and cutting out the outline of the plane. While the other group consisted of Yan Zhen, Antriksh & Eng Kiat. This group was assigned to make the head of the plane. The head of the plane was a little complicated, we intended to use a Concave Joinery to give a more realistic fighter jet aesthetic. But how ignorant we were, The curved design of the head was very difficult to cut out and join together. Even though sand paper was provided, it took a very long time to smoothen out the edges.

While the other group was struggling, Jeevan and I were having our own issues. The body of the plane was big, not to mention irregular shaped as well, making it hard to cut out the shape from the cardboard. The dimensions were also very important, we had to ensure that the body of the plane is big enough so that the head can rest on the body with extra space left for the other features. For example, we had to make sure both sides of the plane were symmetrical and were of 8 cm length if not the plane would look lopsided and uneven. Cutting it out took more than 10 mins which delayed us so much and causes us to rush the projec

So simplify everyone's lives, we decided that the extra features like the side wings and engines will be made out of the cardboard joineries. The engine were made out of Flanges and the smaller side wings were made out of L-Braces and Tabs. So we had 4joineries, all we had to do was add 2 more. Right?? The sheer amount of effort we took even come up with one was fascinating. Something so small, required so much thinking behind it. 

To be frank, we underestimated how difficult it would be to make a flange. Typically a flange is a toilet roll with the ends cut up to make it stable. But during this practical, we were not given any toilet rolls. We had to improvise and roll the cardboard sheet up and cut the end to make it look like a flange. It look me several tries to even make a somewhat mediocre one. The end that were cut to make the flange stable were ugly and uneven, it made me frustrated and annoyed making me want to restart.

In our last efforts to add 3 more joineries. We taped up a few Skewers and cut of the edges to make then aligned, these were going to be the missiles of our fighter jet. We used the Zip Ties provided as a make shift levitation device which allowed for easier take off. This idea was more a futuristic kinda of vibe, with floating vehicles and whatsoever. I know yall can tell it is just my groups making excuses due to the stress from very little time.

Even though we went over the time, Mr Chua gave us a few extra minutes to add our final touches to the design. Due to time constrain, we over used the tape making the design look like design was made just because we were told to do so. And the after the concave shapes were cut out, we had to hot glue them together. This made a huge mess of our model. 

Finally to end off our lesson, we had to present our models. We had to use our trusted Antriksh to explain the story behind our fighter jet or as we call it UPPER JET. It was a joke make from the stereotypically Indian voice saying the words upper. Even though our model was not as good as the others , i believe our group had tried our best and due to my teams story telling ability of using the fighter jet to kill our nemesis, Colonel Sander. We got a good presentation score but our design score was a little lower than the rest but we will make up for it another practical😁😁😁.

This is Antriksh and Eng Kiat Drawing out the head of the plane, such precision and such concentration. So admirable !!!

This is our concave design, I am sure you can tell it is not perfect but 3 hours is not enough for us to prefect this, bare with me okay😭.  If y'all are wondering who that is, its my group mate engkiat

This is me, Dr Bokana diligently doing some measurements for the flange, such a true chemical engineer am I right Guys ;>

This is Jeevan struggling to cut the body of the plane, while I make fun of him by taking pictures HAHAHAHA. Only until he dared me to tried and due to my ego problems I accepted the bet and failed miserably.

This is our marvelous presentation, that brought up our marks and you get too see the amazing storyteller Antriksh and a small feature of the great Dr Bokana. OKAY, I know I am a little thick skinned but you know what too bad.

And of course lastly, our required practical selfies. I REPEAT this is a must for every practical.

Not to forget, our lecturer Mr Chua (in blue). He always helps us take the picture but where's the fun when he is not inside AM I RIGHT???

That is all for this week blog, I hope you all enjoyed making fun of my drawing and my reactions. Stay tuned for more in the future. And as always