OUGD503 - Responsive: Woodwork Enquiry

As I have picked a brief which requires you to make packaging for bacon, I decided to go down to woodwork to see what machines are available and what I could produce. As a mandatory requirement is that you have to actually make the packaging, I didn't want to enter it if I was limited in what I could produce.

Jake, the woodwork fellow there, gave me a list of machines that they have, and a brief explanation of what they do. 

• Radial Arm Saw - This is a cutting machine that responds to the material being fed through the blade to be cut.
• Thickness/Surface Planer - A thickness planer creates panels of the same depth and is flat on both sides
• Router - This creates hollow areas out of wood and can carve curves out of wood as well
• Spindel Moulder - This can handle large duty work, and is a stationary machine. It can be used for cutting through wood, creating grooves or cutting curves.
• CNC machine - This is a very useful machine as a computer tells the machine what to do. You have to create a digital 3D model for this to work, and by doing this the machine can then cut a very accurate model out of wood. You can then use this to create a mould.
• Vacuum Former - Once you have a model made by the CNC machine, you can use it in the vacuum former as it will create a mould out of plastic for you. There are different plastics you can use, some are flexible, some are thick and you can get colour or transparent. This is very useful to create packaging and moulds. 

Although this is very brief information, I have a better idea now of what is available and how I can design the packaging. I now realise that the brief is feasible to do, so I can think about ideas, materials and a concept now.