Creating Finger Joints in Grasshopper

Grasshopper
1

Hi all,

I’m fairly new to grasshopper, great tool, but I find the programming often very convoluted to be honest :(. It rarely feels intuitive to me, but perhaps that is due to different backgrounds (I am no architect f.e).

I made a script to generate (2D) finger joints. It works (kind of, will need to find a workaround for uneven finger joints) but it is quite fiddly, not elegant visual programming imo.There must be a better way to reach this result :slight_smile:
Any advice?

The idea is to develop the script further to parametrically create components for laser cutting (e.g polygons).

I am aware of some great software (Biber) and other methods (Finger Joints - YouTube) to create such joints, but wanted to learn myself (and these solutions don’t always fit my needs).
Finger Joint 2.gh (14.5 KB)

Canvas at 10;43;53
Canvas at 10;43;531532×608 75.4 KB

I wonder whether it would be better to create such geometry by coding rather than VP…

Thanks!

2

Gilles,
Welcome to the Grasshopper world. I am with you in that it does not feel immediately intuitive to use GH. Here is a solution that creates finger joints on both ends of one piece. So when I think about this I think how would I do this analog? I would get a cutter and cut finger joints. So kind of the same thing with GH. The difference being that the cutter is a piece of geometry. So I built some boxes on the end of the piece of wood, sorted those boxes to keep just the ones I want, mirrored those cutters to the other end, cut the piece, then cut that new piece again. Assuming that you are building a box I would then use this piece to cut one end. Mirror both pieces to finish the box. Anyway check it out.
Bill
Finger Joint v1.gh (16.2 KB)

FingerJoint_screen_Shot
FingerJoint_screen_Shot1397×528 141 KB

3

We are doing this because…

4

Hi cimarronlofting,

nice script, thank you! Really interesting to see a very different approach to mine but with great results, I learned a lot from this.

Still a lengthy script, but I guess I still have to get my head around the fact that GH is hands-on, procedural where a lot of small components can be combined instead of a ‘monolithic’ piece if code…Hard to explain,lol.

Thanks again,