WORK: Spaces and Objects for Getting Things Done

Cantilevered Work Desk with Magnetic Work Board

Cantilevered Work Desk

Powder-coated steel with frosted acrylic top

Work Desk Magnetic Board

20 ga. mild steel sheet is applied to the wall behind where the desk will go.

Felt is applied with amorphous adhesive to the sheet steel. Magnets will be used to hang work items.

The frame of the desk is secured to the wall studs.

1' thick frosted acrylic serves as the desk top.

Fabricated for LevenBetts Architecture. Thanks to Michael Cain and Claes Brondal.

Automatic Pen Barrel-Sorting Machine

Here is an odd one. Pen barrels for high-quality ball-point pens are annealed in an electrolyzed solution, dunked randomly in a tank. At the end of the process, the barrels are pointing in every direction. It is relatively easy to orient them along an axis, but now they are pointing in two different directions.

Pen Barrel Sorting Hopper

After the pen barrels are deposited into the top hopper, facing at random in two directions, the extruded aluminum track at the bottom (fabr. by others) draws them out one at a time.

Lego wheels (that's right--high quality urethane there) spun by two contra-rotating motors are adjusted to catch only the wider ends of the tapered barrels.

Each wheel catches only the barrels pointing away from it, flinging only those barrels into the sorted bottom hoppers. And that's how you sort tapered pen barrels.

The gallery above shows how to sort these tapered pen barrels. If you ever need to do that.

As the pen barrels leave the hopper, facing randomly in either of the two directions they might drop into the carrier treads, Tonka Truck wheels, chucked to small motors spinning in opposite directions, grabbed only the thick end of the pen barrel, and shot the barrel into the secondary hopper at the sides.

Cylinders prove to be exceedingly difficult shapes to control in any mass processing procedure.