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...