GearHeads Forum

Finally completed my laser-cut acrylic take on 'Zinnia' after letting the plans and parts sit for almost five years...
Did some re-engineering, mostly to get all the parts to fit the 12"x16" limits of my laser. Wheels are 20", which is about as big as I can segment one up without a ton of waste ...

FWIW, I tried a couple with mineral spirits: the problem is they seemed to gum up a week or so later...some kind of residue attracting cruft in my garage. (The stuff they sell here in SoCal doesn't look/smell like the stuff I remember from my youth.)

"Gunk" engine cleaner worked a lot better ...

For anyone who is interested in mechanical mechanisms, here is a link to a very large PDF book : Mechanisms and Mechanical Devices Sourcebook by Neil Sclater. It does show a copyright so I don't know what the legalities are of downloading this.

http://160592857366.free.fr/joe/ebooks/Mechanical ...

A quick wrap-up...

Just for the record, I didn't use Gearotic to draw the gears, I used Mathias Wandel's GearGenerator3. I redid the gears this morning and re-imported them into CorelDraw, made up a planetary carrier, and cut everything again in 1/4" MDF. Everything lines up, and it meshes and ...

After staring at (and tweaking)  the drawing for a couple of hours, I noticed a couple of things. I'm calling the gears R37, P19, P13, P7, and S11, if that makes sense. It also helped that I made each gear's effective radius equal to 1/10 of its tooth count. (E.g. S11 is 2.2" in diameter ...

Art -

Thanks. I'm not entirely certain I understand your explanation, but whatever you come up with should be fun to play with in any case.  ;D

The thing that's kicking my butt at the moment is that I can (1) generate the gears (Gearotic/Gearify/GearGenerator/whatever), (2) import them into ...

Thanks, no particular hurry.

I used to be able to handle complex maths...

Just in case anyone believes I'm crazy, this is the closest I've been able to render it in CorelDraw:

I did one of those some years back, but I used a different joinery method. I cut box joints, cut off the ends of the fingers at 45 degrees (I used a disk sander), and glued it up. After glue-up, there was another nub sticking out from each finger to trim off.

"Bevel box joint" is probably as good a ...

Those look like somewhat related problems...similar but not quite.

Some further insight:

Given the ring gear and four spur gears I described above, I really "only" need the angles that describe the triangle connecting the planets. Only two unknowns...simple, right? Oh if only...

Consider the ...