Hi Everyone! I was looking at the spare heart that I got out of the middle of the Heart Container keychain I posted, wondering what to do with it, and decided that it belonged in something steampunk-y with gears and movement. So I made a piece that uses planetary gears that rotate around the center axle when the wheel is turned.
Unfortunately, the movement isn’t as smooth as I would like and it keeps catching (you can hear a click in the video where I force it through). And I ended up re-printing the axle out of acrylic because the DB was just thick enough to be too tight for my cross-slots. So, while I doubt that I’ll actually give it a spin every time I walk past it, it does still have a certain aesthetic quality to it that I still like, even if I do consider it a ‘success in failure.’
Thanks for stopping and taking a look, and until next creation, Happy Forging!
I made your Heart Container Keychain and have the same center piece. I painted mine and cut a small circle in it, put some ribbon through the hole and I have a cute Valentine’s Day necklace for a teacher friend of mine. Thanks for the share and the inspiration.
I designed a planetary system and found that if I assembled them out of alignment it would bind like that. Might be worth looking at if you haven’t already found the cause.
Yeah, I did notice after assembly that one of my inner gears shifted by a tooth while I was putting it together and I didn’t notice. It could be binding it. My gut is telling me something somewhere isn’t quite exactly circular or centered along the axis somewhere, maybe.
As when doing inlay, flipping one of neighboring gears results in a more uniform contact between them. This is because the cut edges have a very slight angle.
A little bit of wax (I often use crayons) on any working surfaces makes a huge difference.
Ah, thank you for that! I knew about the slight angle, when I hold a piece I can usually tell which side is up and down…never thought about intentionally flipping one over. So I guess it would be the middle gear and the outer ring? And I will have to try crayon on the edges, not sure how I’d get it on to and in to all the gears, but there’s at least plenty of sliding stuff I do that could use it. Thank you!