Reworking Gears (Week of 3/24)
- vvaldezmelgar
- Mar 27
- 2 min read
Hello Everyone! This week was fairly normal in the Shop. I was only out on Monday due to me coming back from a family trip over the weekend. I mainly worked on reworking the gears this week and I was able to get some physical gears laser-cutted so progress was made. I do believe I could get this project done within the next month. Enough talk, let's dive into the week!
Coming in on Tuesday, I revisited some of the example clock models I found online so I could see how they stacked their gears. Building gears out is much simpler than building them up within a confined space. I found one that worked for my proposes but once I imported it to Fusion so I could take a closer look, I found out that the pieces were separated and nothing was labeled. So, my Tuesday was spent building that model together and sketching out gear plans, I only had pictures to figure how it was put together so that took a while. The re-building of the model definitely helped me understand how to stack the gears vertically and how to space them.
On Wednesday, I worked on the clocks hands or paths that the planets will follow. I decided to make Earth the minute hand and Jupiter the hour hand, given that the Earth moves faster around the Sun than Jupiter. It was tricky to figure out how to model the hands due to clock hands normally being around the same size. I need the planets to circle around the center pole yet not collide with each other. I'm still trying to figure out how to re-model the box lid as with these paths as that would just create floating platforms. I also moved all of the gears into Inkscape files as I wanted to get everything a quick size test but the laser-cutter was being used all day so I had to wait until Thursday.
On Thursday, I was able to cut out the gears in 1/8 wood and I had to size them up inside the laser-cutter program as they were way too small. After I cut them out, and put them together, they fit perfectly! I couldn't really test if they worked as I didn't have the full winding mechanics done. I also worked on getting the winding key done. The Winding Key is a simple crank used to start up spring escapement clocks. I wasn't able to get it fully done but it shouldn't take me too long on Friday to finish and counting the work on the gear models.
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