trim

Our steel erectors, Mike and John, have finished installing most of the steel trim on the outside of the house. The trim provides a clean finish at places where the building materials have been cut roughly and where we've used expanding foam insulation to fill the gaps between the walls and roof. Trim is generally a decorative element, whereas flashing is used to keep water from infiltrating the house. At tin box, both the trim and the flashing are made from sheet metal which has been finished in the same Kynar coating as the wall panels.

digital precision

Over the next week we'll fabricate trim pieces to cover the rough openings between the panels and the structural members. We're using the CNC milling machine at the FIU School of Architecture, with the guidance and extraordinary expertise of my colleague, Eric Peterson. The process is more complex when cutting through steel sheets than when we carved the construction sign. Here is a sample piece fit around one of the W10 beams in the courtyard (the final version will have the same silver paint finish as the wall panels). The fit is pretty precise, and we'll complete the weather seal with a bead of sealant.

milling

We've been playing with the CNC (computer numerical control) milling machine at FIU's School of Architecture. This is a new technology for us (though it's pretty standard for architecture students nowadays) and we're trying to figure out how to use it. In the next two weeks, we'll use the CNC to cut metal sheets into custom trim to use around the beams and purlins that pop through the exterior walls of the house. Today, we carved a large piece of MDF (medium density fiberboard) into a large construction site sign. This little project was a dry run for another project (an exhibition that opens in a couple of weeks) and gave us an opportunity to play with the technology. Eric Peterson, scholar, craftsman and fellow faculty member at FIU, was instrumental at making this work.

Admittedly, the video of the CNC machine at work is not exactly gripping. The system includes software that translates three-dimensional data into carving patterns, and instructs the milling machine on how to subtract areas from solid materials. The video is backwards (reversed left to right) because the only camera I had available was the built-in video on my laptop.