Gift Boxes (Week of 4/6)
- vvaldezmelgar
- 3 days ago
- 3 min read
Hello Everyone! Been a minute since my last blog, right? We didn't have school last Friday, so no blog post last week. This week a bunch of progress was done on the clock and I started a side project that I can work on in the background. The clock is going to take a few more weeks to finish, but its steady progress. Anyways, lets dive into the week!
Starting in on Monday, I worked on(finally) finishing the gears and getting everything in place. I got the Power Reserve(how the clock keeps going after you finished winding it) and the Escapement in. I did change the escapement up from my original model as I could make it more compact so that the other gears had more space in the box and everything wouldn't be so cramped. As well has changing the balance wheel so it holds M3 nuts as weights instead of the bigger M5. Using M5 would've made everything too big. I reworked the Winding gears so that they fit a bit better within the space right next to the front wall, as well as reworking the Winding Key as I didn't like how it looked.
On Tuesday, I started to convert the Gear Box model into something that I could cut on the laser-cutter. I know I'm going to have to 3d print all of the gears due to them needing to be different depths, and we only have wood that's 1/4 thick. I used the simple puzzle piece method on most of the box. As the corners of it I'll have to use some screws at an angle or just wood-glue the corners together. I laser-cutted them and found that the box was kinda small, which is what I wanted. The box is only 3.5x3.5in, but as I was looking that the cardboard prototype, it more looked like the gears wouldn't fit in there or if they did, it would be a very tight fit. So, I decided to size the box up a bit, making it a 4x4in. Doing that kinda broke the model a bit so I had to spend some time fixing everything. I only got it half fixed by the time school ended as I had something else to do during 7th period.
Wednesday, I figured out a small-ish project to work on in the background but I spent some time working on now. I wanted to make a gift for a Teacher who wrote one of my Letters of Recommendation, and I decide on making them a pencil holder for their desk but based it off of a video game character they like. I found a model of a little robot companion that the character has and decide to make that the pencil holder. It was basically just a big sphere, so it wasn't that difficult to hollow out and model in supports for it plus a platform for it to sit on. The problems started when I went to print out the pencil holder. My first attempt at printing, it failed and when I tried my second attempted but thinning the sphere, it also failed. I asked Mr.L to look at it and he told me that it just needed more supports on it. I just switched to resin printing it as a line has sorta formed for the 3d printer as my sphere takes a while. I finished fixing the gear box by Thursday, but I had to continue to work on the gift as the laser-cutter was being used all day. Taking the supports off of a resin print always takes a minute, so that took a few moments of my time. I spend the rest of Thursday just transferring and labeling all of the other gears into a file on my Google drive. I plan on starting to print out all of the gears on Friday, I just need to decide if I'm going to 3d or resin print them. I'll also be able to finish the gift by Friday's end too.
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