A company you’ve done work with, Mystic Materials, lost a group of products from their catalog because the contracting company stopped making them. Now, you’ve produced stained-glass products for them in the past and they’ve been happy with your work, so Mystic Materials decided to ask you if you could produce these products at a cost that would meet their pricing scheme.
These products are made in a very similar fashion as stained glass but are 3D rather than 2D. They’re known as prisms — which are polyhedrons with an n-sided polygonal base, a translated copy, and n faces joining corresponding sides — and Mystic has a bunch of woodblocks they can provide that are the exact dimensions of each product.
What you need to do is measure them and recreate them as hollow glass prisms held together with silver solder, very much like your stained-glass windows that use lead solder. Also, Mystic will provide you with some filler materials, such as sand and shells, beads, and other objects that add to the nature of the product.
You’ll need to create “nets” using Google Sketchup that will be the exact dimensions as the wooden block templates, only in 2D. You’ll be working in centimeters.
Steps to follow:
- Measure the blocks.
- Build the nets in Sketchup, using centimeters.
- Each member of your team will do a rectangular prism and a triangular prism.
- When the standard shapes are properly finished, each team member has a D. To move from D to C to B to A, each team member must correctly create nets for the advanced shapes.
- At some point, we’ll need to cost out each shape to know the final cost after we add our 30% gross margin. And, at some point we’ll learn a cool trick for converting these shapes to 3D.
This is Phase 2 of the Stained-Glass Window project. As you already know, there have been some changes to the teams. The first team configuration remains for Phase 1: Finish the project together, for better or worse.
Phase 3 will be introduced in about a week. Enjoy learning more about Google Sketchup, our CAD program.
Update. You will need to calculate the perimeter of all shapes in each net to determine how much copper tape you need to purchase for each prism. Also, the total surface area must be determined to find out how much clear glass you need to buy for each prism (and then total for total glass purchase–use Excel??). This is a team activity. Later, after Phase 2.1 — coming soon this week — you’ll be able to calculate the total seams to determine how much silver solder you’ll need for each prism (and then figure out total amount–again, Excel?). Mr. Paisley will help with calculations, and I’ll give you tips for using Sketchup to speed up your calculation.s
