This week has been a week of experimentation. I have been playing around with several designs (one is shown below). I was able to fixed the misalignment problems by adjusting the designs slightly to make sure that they turn properly. The more I play around with the gears the more desire I have to create a collection of mechanical jewelry. At the moment, I have been cutting out the designs out of cardboard so that I do not waste the acrylic material. When I made my designs on the computer, I felt comfortable with their size, but as I have begun to test and cut them. The design shown below is about 2.5 inches across. This will be a perfect size for a bracelet, but I am thinking I will need to increase the gear sizes in my necklace design. However, these gear sizes will be perfect for earring. I am continuing to work on designs and ways to make them more unique then clear acrylic.
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It’s nice to see it all coming together, even if it is just in cardboard! It seems like your vision for the design is coming through really strongly. Gardner is right about acrylic not cutting so cleanly on the laser cutter (I experienced this a bit with my first project of the semester). I would recommend accounting for a series of test cuts in which you test out which settings on the laser cutter give you the least amount of damage to the acrylic itself. This was something that I didn’t account for in my first project, but is definitely something that I wish I would have in hindsight.
It’s good to see that you have functioning gears and frame at this point, even if it is cardboard. You might be careful when cutting acrylic however. The laser cutter cuts cardboard very cleanly whereas with acrylic you might get some melted edges or surfaces. Have you thought about a surface finish for the acrylic? It will also be interesting to see the tolerances you can get with all the mechanical pieces.
Looks great and very precise! It would be cool if you could make one out of different colors of hardwood. You might be able to mix hardwood and acrylic for a nice effect. Best of luck!
Very clean! glad to see the frame came out nicely too. How are you going to mount the gears to the frame but still allow them to spin? Not sure if you have thought of anything but there are some cheap and durable dowel pins on mcmaster.