Designed and built a Thor Hammer microphone holder for Engineering Design and Development, a PLTW course in high school. The holder was scaled up from a toy Thor Hammer that belonged to our teacher and redesigned to fit a real microphone inside the handle. The final product was a three-part assembly that snaps together through a locking mechanism and lets the user speak into the microphone while it sits inside the hammer head.
This was an unnecessary invention, and we knew that going in. The goal was not to solve a practical problem but to practice the full engineering design process from constraints and research through modeling and fabrication, using a fun concept as the vehicle.
Used our teacher's toy Thor Hammer as the reference model and scaled it up proportionally so the microphone could fit inside the handle without making the hammer look distorted. Broke the design into three separate parts to make it easier to manufacture and assemble. Added a locking snap mechanism so the pieces connect securely and the microphone can be loaded in through the top. Also incorporated a Celtic Star on the sides of the hammer to represent our classmate Geuss' heritage, and stamped the piece with "Microphone Ethen and Aadi Co 2025" written in Greek letters because it looked cool and gave the project some personality.
The biggest constraint was keeping the hammer proportional to the original toy while also making it large enough to actually hold a microphone. Scaling up a model while preserving visual proportions required careful measurement and several design revisions. Getting the three-part locking mechanism to snap together cleanly and hold under normal use also took a few iterations to dial in.
The final hammer holder fit the microphone correctly, maintained proportional dimensions relative to the original toy, and held together reliably through the locking mechanism. The top opening allowed the microphone to remain fully functional while seated inside the hammer head.
Scaling an existing object into a functional product is harder than it looks. Small proportion errors that seem minor in a sketch become obvious in the physical model. Breaking the design into separate parts early on made the whole build more manageable and made it easier to fix individual sections without rebuilding the whole thing. Also learned that adding meaningful personal details, like the Celtic Star and the Greek text, makes a project feel like it actually belongs to the people who built it.