A tic-tac-toe set turned by hand
Seven pieces turned in brass and aluminium, plates milled from ABS
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Turned brass and aluminium tic-tac-toe pieces seated in the yellow and green milled ABS board, cut out on a plain background
- Context
- Personal project
- Year
- 2023
- Role
- Sole author
- Team size
- 1
- Tools
- Manual lathe · Manual milling machine · Drill press · Cutting data calculation · Brass · Aluminium · ABS
- Contribution
- Sole author, turned, milled, drilled and assembled
A tic-tac-toe set where the playing pieces were turned by hand on a manual lathe, three in brass and four in aluminium, so that the two sides are told apart by material rather than by a printed marking, and where the plates were milled from ABS and drilled to seat them.
Why I made it
This came out of a one-week toolshop course covering manual milling, manual lathing, calculation of cutting data, use of the drill press and safety in the shop, and I wanted to make something with it rather than produce an offcut to throw away. Here a tic-tac-toe set turned out to be a better exercise than it sounds, since seven pieces is enough repetition to find out whether I could hold a dimension twice in a row, and since two materials meant changing the cutting data halfway through rather than setting it once and forgetting about it.
How it was made
Each piece was turned from bar stock to the same stepped profile with grooves cut into the shank, faced and then parted off, with three run in brass and four in aluminium. Furthermore the plates were milled from ABS and drilled to seat the pieces, which is the part that decided whether the set worked at all, since a hole that fits one turned piece and not the next is a tolerance problem rather than a drilling problem. I turned three aluminium rings alongside it as well, together with a holder in a softer plastic I did not note down at the time.
What I took from it
The useful part was not the set but the repetition, since making seven pieces that all have to sit in the same holes is where the difference between a dimension on a drawing and a dimension on a machine stops being abstract. Furthermore brass, aluminium and ABS all cut differently, which meant the cutting data had to be recalculated rather than carried across, and this is the sort of thing that is easy to read in a table and considerably harder to forget once the surface finish has told you about it.
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Course certificate for Patrick Heen, confirming a one-week toolshop course covering manual milling, manual lathing, calculation of cutting data, safety in the toolshop and use of the drill press, noting the participant may use the toolshop only together with supervising staff and never alone, signed by instructor Steffen Jensen