I've been creating parts for my forth coming gear zine. If you've been following along you'll know I'm planning to use photographs of paper gears to illustrate how different types of gear mechanism work. I'm also planning to provide links so that readers can make their own gears to try them out first hand.
It turns out that the design process for bevel gears is an interesting process and will be rewarded with its own blog post shortly. I settled on an 18/24 teeth gear set.
Shown here are the inner supports holding up the cone of the 24 tooth gear.
...and here are the actual teeth.
The two parts fit together to make this rather satisfying gear.
Both gears meshing together. I'll be putting together a downloadable project of these parts shortly.
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Friend of the website Cathy Fulton writes from an island in the Puget Sound situated at the top left of the US of A
Where she lives they see Orcas swimming past in the sea! She has recreated the spectacle in paper using a crank slider mechanism. If you look closely at the picture she sent you can also Mt. Rainier in the background. What a fantastic looking place!
Cathy also sent through an animation of her splendid Orca model in action. Spurred on by interest from visitors to her stall at the local farmer's market Cathy has created a simpler downloadable version with a single Orca, again based on a crank slider mechanism.
Now anyone with access to the internet and $5.95 can download and make Cathy's design. Very nice it is too. Thanks Cathy, I've got mine printed out and ready to go!
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The scales texture in the sssnake! project was created with the aid of a splendid new tool from Astute Graphics. Collider Scribe is a £10 add-on for Adobe Illustrator designed to help lining up and arranging objects in your illustrator projects. It make short work of arranging these various sized circles so that their edges are accurately touching. Here's how.
Create a long thin shape for the snakes body. Draw out some circles of decreasing size. These will be used as a the scales. I used the same fill colour as the body and a lighter colour set at 2pt for the stroke.
<Shift> drag a row of the larger circles up the centre of the body. This is where the Collider Scribe tool comes in. As I shift drag a shape it snaps into position onto any shapes it comes near, This makes it really easy to position shapes so that they are just touching.
Use the Collider Scribe tool to fill in the remaining shapes positioning larger circles in the centre and smaller shapes towards the edges. Let Collider Scribe snap them into position for you!
Once the body is full of circles it is time to change their hues. I used this free script to change the colours randomly. Download it and save it to your computer. Select all the circles, but not the background then select File -> Scripts -> Other Scripts and select the Vary Hues script from your computer.
This is the result after running the script with and input value of 25.
Complete the snake skin by adding a clipping mask to trim off any excess circles.
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A crank slider driven snake. Turn the handle and the snake rocks back and forth. Is it charmed or is it about to strike!? Build your own and find out.
This project is free for members to download - thanks for signing up! Non-members can download the project for £2.50
Print out the parts onto thin card. Note that the three sheets come as a colour version and a line version. the colour version is printed on both sides. Print out one side, flip the card over and return it to the printer then print the other side. Score along all the dotted and dashed lines and cut out the holes before carefully cutting out the pieces.
Fold over the crank shaft ends and glue them down to make double thickness card. Once the glue is dry cut out the centre holes then cut out the pieces. Set them to one side.
There are three paper tubes to make. Each is made from tightly rolled paper. I roll the paper round a chopstick to make a smooth curve. Roll the tube so that the end lines up exactly with the edge of the grey area then glue down the end. Assemble all three tubes like this.
Glue the long push rod together the make a square section tube. Glue the two push rod ends into place using the grey areas for alignment. Fit the longer round tube into the push rod ends and make sure that it is running square to the main push rod before the glue on the push rod ends dries.
Make up the two shorter square tubes and glue one to each end of the round pin as shown. Make sure that they are lined up with each other and the pin remains free to turn.
Glue on the two spacers and the two longer square tubes as shown above. Make sure everything stays lined up!
Glue the two remaining pins into place as shown.
Assemble the handle in three steps. Fold the two square sections and glue them down. Fold and glue one square section into the other. Roll round the long tab and glue it down.
On the two box sides, fold up and glue the triangular section tubes to make right angled triangles.
Glue the two box sides together.
Fold the box round and fit the crank shaft pins into the circular holes in the box.
Glue the box together.
Thread the lid and slider tube down over the main push rod. Glue the lid to the box and then glue the bottom flaps of the box down making sure to keep everything square.
Fold in the four flaps and glue them to the inside walls of the box.
Glue the handle to the drive pin.
Glue the two parts of the snake together.
Complete the model by gluing the small tab on the top of the main push rod to the back of the snake's head and the snake's body to the top of the box.
That's it. I hope your ssssnake looks sssssuper!
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Inspired by the smooth running of the gear bearings I thought I'd have a go at improving the bearings on my basic crank slider mechanism to see how well it would work. Turns out - pretty well!
In the original crank slider mechanism a square shaft fits into a circular. Simple but not very precise. Square shafts are handy because they can be joined together easily. This is because they have nice flat surfaces for gluing.
By gluing a circular tube into the square tube I aim to achieve the best of both works. Accuracy and ease of joining.
A secondary side effect of the switch to circular axles is that the hole through which the axle passes is smaller. In this case 10mm diameter instead of 14mm. This means that the ends of the main push rod and be smaller and neater.
The assembled unit fits nicely into the box.
Turn the handle and the crank turns beautifully smoothly with very little play. A big improvement on the previous design whilst still being easy to make.
It might make a nice cobra!
I'll put together a download version of the mechanism for members to download tomorrow.
<---- edit ---->
It's really nice to have #1 Daughter is back home from uni. She's been watching 'Chalet Girl' with #truelove and I've been cutting and sticking. I made this snake prototype :-)
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The hypocycloid mechanism is used to make a compact, simple gear box that reduces rotational speed. In the case of this animation the reduction is 7:1. Follow one of the lobes of the six pointed rotor with your eye and see how it advances one notch anticlockwise for each rotation of the blue rotor. By adding two similar mechanisms back to back it is possible to multiply up the the gear reduction ratio
Using FlashThe blue piece is an off-centre drive shaft connected to the main drive. The output of the drive would be from the front.
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Okay, back to the gear zine. I'm not sure whether this will work but I've been experimenting with cycloid gears. They are looking promising so far. The cycloid is the shape traced by a point on a circle as the circle rolls.
In this case, I've wrapped seven cycloids round the outside of a circle generating this hypocycloid internal gear.
The six lobed gear uses lobes the same size as the circle used to create the cycloid. These fit neatly into the seven segment hypocycloid.
The inner piece rotates in a sort of eccentric way within the outer advancing one tooth at a time as it does so.
I'll see if I can put together a stop motion or a flash animation of the mechanism shortly to more clearly explain what is going on.
It is certainly looking like a promising mechanism. If I can get it working smoothly it will make an interesting project with some interesting uses. A single gear like this reduces speed by a ratio of 1:7 adding a second gear back to back with the first should reduce the ratio a further 1:7 making a total reduction of 1:49 with only three moving parts!
Fingers crossed.
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Three videos for you to enjoy on YouTube. Firstly, from the hand of Michael42er, we have his splendid version of the recent squeeze box project featuring two sizes of squeeze box. Nice work Michael!.
Secondly, I also produced a video of the squeeze box in action. I added it to the original post a couple of days after it was originally posted so incase you missed it...
And finally, I splashed out on a new book from Amazon. Papercraft by Robert Klanten is full of all sorts of inspirational work by many different artists. Here's a quick preview. If you are interested you can buy yourself a copy here and simultaneously earn me a modest commission :-)
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A working paper squeeze box accordion to print out and make. It only plays two notes but hey, it works and it is made from paper!
Members can download the parts for free as usual, non-members can download the parts file for £2.50 from the link above. The file comes as a coloured and no-coloured version.
Print the bellows on to standard printer paper, print out the rest of the parts onto thin card.
Score along the dotted and dashed lines and cut out the holes before carefully cutting out the pieces.
Pre-crease along all the scored lines of the bellows piece.
Glue along the back of the edge opposite the grey edge with a glue stick.
Roll the tube around and glue it together as accurately as possible.
This is tricky so take your time.
Starting on the row below the top end of the tube. Fold one parallelogram with four hill folds round the outside and a valley fold across the centre.
Repeat this process all the way round to complete a row of paralleograms.
Work your way down the tube to the row before the end.
Complete the bellows tube by folding in the ends. Notice that here the hill and valley folds are reversed.
The instructions for the two end pieces are basically the same apart from one minor change. The instructions here are for end 'b'
Make up the tapered blow hole.
Glue on the longer of the two 'b' pieces. This will be the vertical piece. Glue the tab to the grey area on the blow tube.
Glue the second 'b' piece to the grey area to make the horizontal bar.
Glue the top of the blow-hole to the box next to the slot arrowed. Note that it glues onto the side of the slot that has the largest area.
Glue the side of the blow hole to the side of the box along with the side tabs on the vertical and horizontal pieces. Make sure you line up the ends of the horizontal and vertical pieces with the edge of the box arrowed.
Fold up and glue the sides of the box.
The second box 'a' is basically the same but the horizontal piece is fitted slightly higher up in the box closer to the slot.
Fold down and glue into place the lids of the two boxes. Once the glue is dry you can test them by blowing through the holes in the sides. If they are not sounding clearly make sure that the centre of the blow hole lines up with the opposite end of the slot.
Glue the bellows to one box.
Glue the second into place. Let the glue dry completely.
Complete the project by gluing the handles into place.
Pull and push the ends to make the whistles sound!
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So, I produced this quick paper accordion model to go with the paper bellows but it does nothing beyond looking pretty.
I really wanted it to make a sound. Proper accordion sounds are impractical in a project this size but a bit of discordant whistling would keep me happy.
To the drawing board!
I've learnt through my various past experiments that a whistling pipe needs a tapering blow hole blowing air over a slot. I fitted some baffles inside the hex box (black lines above) to direct the air and fitted a tapered blow hole lined up with a suitable slot. The result: perfect whistling! 1046hz according to the app on my phone. Roughly a 'c' two octaves above middle 'c'
The downside being the big sticky-out-bit on the side of the box. I wondered if I could fit the tapering tube inside the body of the hexagon.
And so we have this. Air, to be provided by bellows, blows though the hole in the side of the box through the tapering tube and across the underside of the slot at the top of the picture above.
Once assembled and with the glue dry the finished box sounds a nice clear whistle. I'll make another with a different note by moving the baffles inside to change the volume of the resonant cavity and fit that at the other end of the bellows.
With the bellows in place a quick test shows that everything is working nicely so far...woot woot!
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