Amazing kinetic sculptor from San Fransisco

Check out this amazing kinetic sculptor by the name of Reuben Margolin from San Francisco.

I can only dream of this sort of complexity for now. Wow!

(Goto the YouTube site and watch in HD, it's stunning work!)

The Gearbox takes shape...

Steady progress has been made constructing the gearbox that will hold all the wooden gears and bearings. Despite having measured drawings and cutting carefully, I made a few minor mistakes getting the dimensions just right. No amount of detail and careful execution helps when cutting wood is involved. It swells and warps depending on humidity, and if you pencil lines are just a smidge one side or the other, these can all add up to a couple millimeters of error.

The first attempt at fitting parts together had a few issues. Some of the cross braces were a few millimeters out and made any attempt to fit this complex box together quite difficult. Word of advice, when making wooded parts for something like this, a mm or two of give may be a good idea. Also triple check your drawings. Some precise alignments might make sense if this were metal, but you need give when working with wood.
Though as you can see here after a bit of filing and nibbling with my saw it fit together nice and tight.
There is no glue used here, but it holds together just fine. I'm using straight grained fir and various thicknesses of Baltic birch ply. I eventually plan to stain darker and polish with various waxes to give it an 'antique' look...


Next: finish a couple more gear support parts, then on to installation of the bearings and gears (taking into account the slight measurement changes), and designing a new driver gear.

quick update

Well poor Japan has been hit once again with tragedy. It's hard not to look at the news images after visiting such an amazing country. Many places I personally visited and enjoyed the most were small coastal towns and cities, much like Sendai and Fukushima. It's so heartbreaking to imagine all those lives just gone and swept away by the sea. 


I'm trying to distract myself with new career plans and of course working on the Mars orery when I can.


Here's the latest image of my CAD edits as I plan the gearbox out...

The small red things on the end of the blue idler wheels are 3D representations of my new Ignus plastic bearings that I have received as samples. ( http://www.igus.com/default.asp?PAGE=IGLIDE) What's great here is that this is all to scale, so I've gone ahead and made quite a few of the smaller parts. What is not shown here is that I've replaced the four smaller idler gears with two larger ones. So long as all the gears are in pairs (as with the other two trains) and not singles, the direction of movement will still remain the same.
I've recently made a jig so that I can round off the ends of the 1/2 inch pinions with a router that has a round-off bit with a 1/4 inch bearing. It took a few tries but it seems to be working well.


Next is the supporting frame. 
More soon...