For this assignment, we were tasked with creating a kinetic sculpture driven by a motor.

Picture of me planning out my project with my fellow classmates.

I wanted to work towards my final project idea and build the basic carriage mechanism for the car carousel.

I started off by modeling the mechanism itself in Fusion. I also built in joints to simulate the movement of the mechanism and better understand how to assemble the model once created in real life.

I also chose to build my sculpture out of wood boards and aluminum rods rather than out of cardboard and premade 3d printed parts. This presented its own set of challenges of having to cut the wood and aluminum rods, dealing with the physical size of the model, and my general inexperience working with the materials.

Construction of the gears.

When it came to the wheels that would drive the mechanism, I opted to use laser cut pieces of cardboard. This was because the gears would be light and easy to turn, and would not take 5 hours per gear to 3d print (unfortunately this use of cardboard created issues that you will see very soon).

Fully assembled mechanism.

Here is the full assembly. To connect the gears together, I used a insulating tube as a timing belt between the two gears. The insulating tubes have enough friction to pull the wheels along and connect the two mechanisms.

As you can see, the model works! I made a small box for the motor and the board to sit on during operation. The motor drives the bottom wheel, which is then connected to the other four wheels to turn the entire structure and drive the two belts.

However, after taking that video, the post on the motor had stripped the cardboard holding mechanism that connected the motor to the mechanism. The combined strength of the motor and the amount of power required to drive the mechanism was all concentrated in the maluable cardboard and ultimately caused the mechanism to become stripped. In future iterations, I will probably end up 3D printing the gears and hopefully not have this issue.