I made a counter to track life points in Magic: the Gathering from 20 down to 0. The design uses planetary gears, which are pretty neat because they rotate without needing an axle.
The attached file has the gears and numbers and everything, but I left out the mana symbols because copyright. You can pretty easily find vector versions of those, however, and just stick them in before cutting.
I posted assembly instructions below for putting it together, which is a bit tricky.
I built everything with Inkscape’s “Render > Gear” extension. I follow this video tutoral for instructions on inverting the outer gear.
The inner gears I also gave a 0.1mm stroke, then used “Stroke to Path” and took the inner paths to make them a little smaller. Kerf by itself was not enough to allow free motion.
Lovely, the top one catches my eye in particular. For easy kerf adjustment of shapes in Inkscape, investigate Ctrl-( and Ctrl-). The steps it uses can be redefined in preferences.
Hands down the greatest and most useful thing posted on this message board! Thank you! You have also inspired me to learn about gears so that I can learn to make something this darn cool!
I printed it all out and it looks great but I am having trouble getting it to work. I am wondering if I assembled it incorrectly. Could you give a brief description of how to put it together?
I’ve tried the inset/outset command but in my experience they end up distorting the path (simplifying it, I think?). Which is unfortunate because they’re a lot more straightforward than the Stroke to Path technique.
It does, indeed, especially sharp corners. For those, I usually directly manipulate. However a small distortion of .0025 or so in more organic shapes never seems to matter.
