Tuesday, September 21, 2010

Steady progress in the CAD department

Well things are progressing fairly well with my digital reproduction of the Chahakobi Ningyo that I saw up close and personal in Nagoya last year. While battling a cold I've managed to design and align a few of the gears for the mechanism. I've been using a freeware program called Inkscape to design the gears, and so long as you keep the circular pitch and pressure angle of the teeth the same, they will mesh up. The only issue is the distance between the gears. This is where my CAD software, Alibra, comes in handy. I can set various parts to be transparent and align manually. Here's an example:
 I now know where to align the hole properly. Of course until this is all made out of wood I'll never know if it will work 100%. The current 'hobby' version of this Cad software does not allow me to actually mesh and run these gears. However I have an idea how to do that.
Stay tuned. 
As for progress, here's a nice little artsy shot of my current state of things...


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