The CNC punch press is an architect’s dream tool. It can accurately cut, punch, mark, form, slice, texturize, and roll a variety of sheet metal materials without expensive tooling – a literal Swiss Army Knife of digital fabrication.
Louver Surface is a product prototype for a new category of perforated metal panel. A Louver Surface panel is a metal sheet, laser cut to produce an array of metal tabs and louvers. Once cut, the louvers can be robotically bent to produce custom transparency, articulation, and open-air values.
Summer 2018 was very productive for the Zahner R+D team with two interns joining from opposite ends of the United States. Burcin Nalinci, a Cal Poly/Sci Arc graduate and Michelle Menkiti, an MIT undergraduate, interned between our R+D and Advanced Manufacturing Departments. Their projects,Robot Assisted Welding and Moving Metal, tackled the complexities of manufacturing within the context of mass customization.
Research conducted by Elena Vazquez and James Coleman.
Update: Our friends at Virginia Tech reached out to Zahner to share some of the similar innovations for automated manufacture of shading systems. In 2010, Zahner worked with Virginia Tech on the Lumenhaus project whose laser-cut tabs were pushed by hand. In 2012, Nathan King and Jonathan Grinham published Automating Eclipsis, a research paper outlining a method for automation, as well as a proof of conceptvideo of their method using a robot to automate the tabbed panel system.