In a unique collaboration, the Centre for Advanced Wood Processing (CAWP) at UBC partnered with Magee Secondary School’s Design + Fabrication Program to present students with an exciting challenge: designing and fabricating a functional chair from a single sheet of plywood using CNC technology. This hands-on project introduced students to the fundamentals of CNC machining, including design optimization and manufacturing processes.
Under the guidance of CAWP’s technical staff, students learned to use SketchUp for digital modeling and participated in critiquing sessions to refine their designs. The project culminated in the fabrication of selected chair designs using a 3-axis CNC machine, allowing students to witness the transformation of their digital concepts into physical creations.
The final showcase displayed the students’ creativity and skills, highlighting the importance of practical, real-world experiences in education. This initiative not only enhanced the students’ understanding of design and fabrication but also sparked interest in future careers in design, engineering, and technology. The collaboration exemplifies how educational institutions can work together to foster innovation and inspire the next generation of designers and fabricators.
The Wood Innovation Group (TWIG) initially started in 2015 as an in-person meetup gathering under the name “Outside The Box Meetup Group”. In 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic, TWIG emerged as a response to staying connected. TWIG is creating an industry-leading forest products innovation ecosystem, rooted in wood-science, informed by craft, and focused on increasing connectivity through design and creativity.
The ‘Monthly’ event is a recurring get-together to connect around topics, projects, and ideas that bring value to forest-based resources in BC. Each event has a featured guest, and we invite them to tell their story and share the why and how behind what they do.
The focus of the Monthly over the next few months will be centered around people who have developed and manufactured products, either through partnerships or their own production capacity. Information on our past Monthly events and future events can be seen at twigbc.ca/monthly. To get updated information directly, sign up for our mailing list on the website and/or follow TWIG on LinkedIn.
The Centre for Advanced Wood Processing (CAWP) at the University of British Columbia (UBC) in collaboration with the University of Northern British Columbia (UNBC) is pleased to announce the British Columbia Timber Building and Technical Tour to showcase leading manufacturers of mass-timber building components, prefabricated energy efficient homes, and modular building systems fabricators.
The UBC CAWP has been leading tours to Europe for over 15 years. This tour is an opportunity for participants to visit some of BC’s leading mass-timber building component and prefabricated building systems manufacturers, many of whom have attended our past tours to Europe and have adopted and implemented principles and technologies into their manufacturing practices. These companies provide building solutions to meet the sustainability and green building requirements of advanced energy efficient materials, and mass-timber products for single family, multi-family, and non-residential construction.
The latest piece of new equipment to arrive at CAWP is a 3D printer known as a Lulzbot TAZ 2.0. We have acquired the machine to start investigating what is possible with this technology. We’re especially interested in using a printing material, or filament, called Laywoo-D3. It’s a wood-based 3D printing filament invented by Kai Parthy in the Netherlands and is a wood/polymer composite containing 40% recycled wood mixed with binding polymers.
