Very cool idea from Ponoko seller ticktock showroom, and reasonably priced at $100 US. Could be a fun remake, too, especially if, like me, you’ve been looking for a use for that old piece of motorcycle chain you can’t quite bring yourself to throw out. [via Boing à la Boing]
Here, automata guru Dug North rounds up four expedient methods for improvising a worm drive given an on-hand spur gear. Digging through our archives also reveals this interesting method for coming at the problem from the other direction, i.e. improvising a spur gear for an on-hand worm!
OK, obstacle “reflectance” might be a better term, since this Lego Automatic Synchro Drive from YouTuber xyzzzach bounces off of obstacles, rather than actually avoiding them. But its design is so clever it deserves a bit of nomenclatural slack, IMHO.
Over on CRAFT, Katie Wilson has some exclusive comments from Oakland artist Shawn HibmaCronan, whose mechanical sculpture “The Press” is on display at Terminal 2 of the San Francisco International Airport until 2021. I’m guessing the lawyers put a rope around it when they saw those big potentially-finger-crushing gears, but Shawn talks about how important it was to design the mechanism to be operated by a single person. So it’d be cool if they actually let people operate it.
Recently, we’ve been messing about with motors and gears at Pemtech. Students in one of my classes are building an underwater ROV, and we don’t have any decent propellers. Rather than shop for them, we’re fabbing our own with the laser cutter and Makerbot. Earlier this week, Jett worked out the proper dimensions to fit a plate to a motor shaft. He did this by measuring out a range of holes and then cutting them in quarter inch acrlyic. Once they came out of the laser, he tried pushing the motor into each of the holes until he found the ‘goldilocks fit.’ Once we had a plate, he used the same process to cut a series of holes in the plate that could be threaded with M3 screws. This setup allows us to attach anything to a motor.
We have done both gear- and gear-making-related roundups before, but our gear world has turned (bam!) quite a few times since then, and we’ve covered some even hotter gear action in the interim. Someday there’s going to be a gear-roundup roundup. But for now, here’s our top gear content as it stands today:
The latest of many truly outstanding wooden toys from Japanese YouTuber kinohagurama. [via The Automata / Automaton Blog]
