Copyright Michael Snively 2010
Paperweight
I was tasked to create a paperweight out of an aluminum blank using both a CNC mill and a CNC lathe.
MIT students have a history of putting things on roofs, things you wouldn’t normally expect to find, and especially on our great dome.
To commemorate this history, I designed my paperweight to look like MIT’s dome and to have footprints etched into the top, representing the marks left by sneaky students late at night. The design began as a SolidWorks model.
It was then transfered into MasterCAM and fed into a CNC lathe.
Next, the paperweight took a turn in the mill.
30 minutes and some cleaning later, the paperweight was done, a nearly perfect replica of the original design.
