Mr. Đức thắng Nguyễn (Duc Thang Nguyen) is an engineer from Vietnam. Since his retirement in 2002, he has being working on an amazing animated 3D catalog of mechanical contraptions.
Using Autodesk Inventor as a tool, he has documented over 1,700 mechanisms. All from gears, couplings, clutches, differentials to detailed examples of movement conversions. For every mechanism Nguyen has generated a corresponding animated YouTube video. These videos are an invaluable source to understand some of the more convoluted and challenging mechanisms. The video-clips portray a mesmerizing collection of kinetics sculptures on their own and can be enjoyed for their sheer aesthetic value.
Through a file-sharing website, Nguyen generously provides an overview of all his contraptions nicely organized into mechanical themes. The PDF files include pictures, short descriptions, and direct links to the videos. I strongly encourage you to visit Nguyen’s YouTube Channel and spend some time studying his work. You will find a treasure trove of ingenious solutions to a wide range of real life mechanical applications. If you own a 3D printer and want to improve your CAD skills, pick a compelling mechanism. Model and print it.
There are so many to pick from, but here are 10 of my personal favorites:
Linkage for tracing a parallelogram
Persian joint
Application of rack pinion mechanism
Planetary clutch
Door for limited space
Keeping direction unchanged during rotation
Archimedean drive
Friction cone variator
Internal Geneva mechanism
Converting interrupted rotation to continuous rotation
12 thoughts on “Understand 1,700 Mechanical Linkages with these Helpful Animations”
Comments are closed.
Nguyen generously provides an overview of all his contractions ???
The man clearly loves his apostrophes! (And they fixed the typo)
neat stuff
Nice, though I’m more of a fan of physical models – like the Clark Collection at Boston’s Museum of Science:
http://kmoddl.library.cornell.edu/clark.php
http://www.mos.org/sites/dev-elvis.mos.org/files/images/ftg-offerings/offering_ClarkCollection.jpg
Very nice. Thanks!
The Reuleaux collection is amazing, too – http://kmoddl.library.cornell.edu/model.php?m=reuleaux
some of the linkages they came up with in the steam age are quite wonderful.
Cool!
New Amazing Way of makezine…. ;
▬▬▬▬▬☛ http://GrowUpLifeTimeSuccess.com </a
Dr. Nguyen Duc Thang got his Doctor of Engineering in 1984 from Kosice University of Technology, Slovakia.
The pdf linked to seems to be a zip file which I can’t unzip (corrupted) – is there another source?
“improve you CAD skills”
Thanks. Correction was made