when you defeat the gym leader in toronto's west end they give you this badge.

I first learned about this symbol when people started posting it on twitter. I really like the way it looks, and its representation of the 6 boroughs of Toronto.

Recently, a close friend that I care a lot about told me they’re moving back to New York. They were living there for around 2 years, before moving to Toronto for the first time. We started hanging out around May when they first moved here. Toronto was the constant backdrop of our developing friendship. Any time we saw each other Trinity Bellwoods was our starting place. We’d spend hours walking aimlessly together, on multiple occasions all the way across the city, from Leslieville to Roncesvalles, at 2am or 2pm in the 36º heat under the sun.

Honestly during those walks I started to see and feel short-comings of the city that I hadn’t felt or thought about when I walked by myself, but they stuck out when she was there. It was her first time living in Toronto, and she loves New York. I wanted so badly to show her all the good in the city, everything I love about it – the people, the parks, the food, the hidden gems; I wanted to show her that it can be even better than New York. Any bad coffee we drank together became personally offensive – how could someone set up a whole business just to serve coffee and the coffee is shit??

Anyway, I wanted a keepsake to give her. Something that would remind her of all the good in the city, and all the time we spent together here. Something to keep on a keychain as a reminder that Toronto’s still there, waiting for her.

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Initially, I was going to machine the piece on the Tormach at the maker space from a solid piece of billet. That plan was scrapped because the 5000RPM spindle is about 75% slower than it needs to be to cut each of the 6 slots (0.89mm wide).

Which is fine, because it meant that we got to be creative about how we made them, which obviously lead to SendCutSend. We tweaked the design slightly to suite laser cutting, since initially there weren’t going to be any holes, just recesses. We had them build 25 blanks made from 316 stainless steel since we had a sense that that’s the ideal material for something like this, but decided to get two units made from grade 5 titanium, one for each of its makers.

Since receiving them we’ve designed 5 revisions of fixtures, and built 3 for post machining. We’ve experimented with 4 different finishes on the surface of the parts including: helical face milling, face milling with an indexable facemill, and various hand buffing/polishing methods.

Honestly this has been my favourite part of the process, and what this was all about for me. Although I’ve still been designing parts for machining recently, I haven’t actually used a VMC in years since I left Magnus. Experimenting with CMF and design in something so small and simple, that has no real purpose other than how it looks and feels has been so refreshing. Usually everything I’m designing or making is purely an exercise in functionality. Even though the solution to post machine blanks from SCS is way faster and more efficient, I long for the longer more painful road to building one purely from billet.

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Now I have 25 units of these Toronto Gym Badges (Case was the first person to call them that), with no idea what exactly I should do with them. I’d like to do something a little more creative and fun for their distribution, give them to New Demos participants, or something of that nature. I really like the Gym Badge analogy, and this project started out as something very meaningful to me, and I’d like to avoid diluting that importance.