The main project in Design and Manufacturing II (2.008) is a yo-yo. The class is split into sections of about eight students that each produce one yo-yo. My team decided on a space theme, with an astronaut floating in space, tethered to a spaceship. As soon as I thought about space-walking, I thought of the first American to walk in space, Ed White. So, I googled "ed white spacewalk," and found that Ed White's space-walk took place 40 years to the day of the commencement for the class of 2005 (3 June 1965). I was responsible for the design of the spaceship, and made the ship a scale model of the Gemini capsule, like the one used in the space walk. However, when it came time to machine the molds, my design proved too intricate and hard to machine (our CAM package couldn't do parallel lacing, it was only 2.5 axis). So, I simplified the design by squaring off the part, although the outline of the ship remained to scale. The mold that produced the Gemini also made the astronaut, who had a peg on his back, to attach to the backpack/tether piece connected to the Gemini. When the pieces were assembled, the tether was bent by hand, so that the astronaut was left floating in space, protected by the clear plastic dome.

During assembly we found that the pegs used to attach the ship to the sky piece were too long, due to different shrinkage rates of the parts, and they were pushing the sky piece away from the glowing star piece when fully inserted. So, I made the cutting jig shown below to trim the Gemini's pegs to the right length, quickly and accurately. The device is made of a razor blade from a utility knife and a piece of foamcore. The Gemini was placed into the sky piece, and pieces of the pegs extending out of the sky piece were cut of by simply pushing the assembly against the blade. Since we had to assemble 50 yo-yos, the jig's ease of use was very important. The device worked well, and we were able to fix all of the pegs with only five more seconds of work or so per yo-yo.