A major project in the unit Modelling Making and Workshop Practice that required the creation of a DV camera, of our own design which had tactile buttons, a lens and a fold-able LCD screen. The brief was used to familiarize ourselves with the machinery and tools available in the workshop. We chose to design a Professional Mini HDV camera which was named the ‘Dobrovski Handheld’ – lifting the name from ‘Swarovski’ – who manufacture crystal jewellery and optical lenses.
The design is fairly classical and robust, it’s simple yet detailed which struck the right balance, especially when making a primitive wooden model. An extremely rough CAD and blue foam model was used to get the scale, placement and colour combinations (iconic Dyson Vacuum colors of course) all correct.
Most of camera is a soft sculpt-able wood called Jelutong but intricate details were machined into fibre glass, bogged up on the wood. After the camera was broken down into components (seen below), each part was sealed, primed, sanded down, sprayed (with metallic automotive acrylic), added stickers/decals then clear coated. The buttons and the lenses were made from acrylic plastic and the knobs were turned down from aluminium and polished with Brasso. The case was vacuum formed from more acrylic as with the display stand which had aluminium posts and a printed graphic background added. The machinery used = disc sander, band saw, milling machine with indexing head, drill press, lathe and a great deal of sand paper with varied grits.