All articles and portfolio pieces

Woodworking Projects
January 03, 2018

Some favorite woodworking projects from 2018-2021. Checkout my woodworking album for more!

  • Turned oak and padauk meat tenderizer.
  • Pen and pencil set made with purple heart and a stainless steel hardware kit. The pen is slightly longer than the pencil to accommodate Pilot Precision refills.
  • Turned acrylic for stainless steel bottle stopper and bottle opener.
  • Turned spalted tamarind bottle stopper with a burned "K."
  • Chinese Checkers board painted in the style of my grandmother's board.
  • Turned wooden bowl with a burned letter "B."
  • A pair of salt and pepper t-top grinders using olivewood and chechen.
Harry Potter Wands
January 01, 2018

I created a collection of Harry Potter wands over the years (hand carved and lathed). Designs are not accurate to their movie counterparts, and the movie productions were typically not accurate to the book descriptions (mostly the length, I read that the book lengths did not look good on film).

  • Remus Lupin-inspired wand for the showing of "The Half-Blood Prince" (dowel, 2009).
  • Hand carved the Elder wand for my Voldemort costume for the Deathly Hallows showing (bassword, 2011).
  • Two versions of Draco Malfoy's wand (dowel, hawthorn, ~2017).
  • A custom design (poplar, ~2017).
  • Alastor Moody's wand (poplar, ~2017).

Check out my woodworking album

Rubik's Cube Solving Robot
August 01, 2015

RIXAN is a local automation company that builds cells for manufacturing companies, but in this case, the customer was the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago. MSI was planning a Robot Revolution exhibit and commissioned various displays from different companies. In our case, we built a cell where the user could scramble a Rubik's Cube, provide it to the robot, and the robot would solve it. My FANUC programming experience from MLPC was Teach Pendant based, but this project taught me how to communicate directly with the controller, read the current status of the system, and activate specific routines. As this system was going to a museum, it also required two displays: a guest display visualizing the user-provided cube as the robot solved it and an operator/maintenance display. Thankfully, a Rubik's Cube solver already existed, so my work focused on integrating the robotics, vision system, and solver into one cohesive unit.