For our midterm project, we were tasked with recreating one of the 507 Mechanical Movements using the tools we had learned so far – the laser cutter and plasma cutter. When I first started looking for a movement to recreate, I didn’t know exactly what I was looking for – just that I wanted to make a model that I could decorate and make look like more than a just something copied out of a book. When I saw movement 419, I immediately knew what I wanted to do with it and how I could make it look cool.

To start off, I just recreated the movement in Illustrator so I could have the sizes of the components right.  I decided early on that I would have one side nicely decorated and the other would be exposed so you could see the mechanism at work. For my decorations, I found a picture of a pirate ship online and used image trace to bring it into Illustrator, dressed up the wheel that controls the rocker, and created water to attach to the base and to put on the spinning wheel where the crank handle would go. After I had done all of this though, I knew I had to make an early model to check on the sizing and base, as well as make sure it’d work.

My first model was a little small, but I made it out of wood to see how strong my post would be. It was held together mostly with tape and hot glue, but I learned a lot from it – I had to fix the joints on my base, as well as make it much bigger, but my mechanism was definitely going to work out without too much revision.

For my next model, I upped the size a lot and tried out a more secure and round base. I also added some of my intended decorations. This helped me figure out where I would need spacers to keep the parts from hitting each other.  I also added a few decorations in this stage and modified my design for the wave that I had based on how it looked spinning. I had to go back and modify my base because the joint was again a little off, but all of the holes for the pegs fit nicely.

For my final design, all I had to cut out was my new base and water, as I decided to just reuse the other parts that I had. Originally I planned to make the water out of clear acrylic, then paint it blue on one side, but there wasn’t any so I just ended up using wood. I still had to use the plasma cutter to create a part, so I decided to make the connector between the two wheels out of aluminum. But because the plasma cutter didn’t cut things out in the right order, I had to get a lab tech to use a drill press to drill the holes into it. Then I just filed and wire brushed it.

Next I started finishing my model, wood gluing the layers of the base together, then coating the wood with danish oil because I wanted it to be a lighter color than the stains would’ve gotten it. To color my ship, I decided to use markers so I could keep all of the details and make it look like the original picture. To do this, I first coated the ship in danish oil, as I realized the marker didn’t seep into the wood and spread out if the wood had been treated first, then colored it with various markers before coating it with a clear satin spray paint. For my water pieces, I spray painted them a dark blue, added some lighter highlights on the tips, then coated it with some of the ultra thick glossy spray paint to give it a somewhat glassy, watery look.

Putting the whole thing together was a lot harder than I thought it’d be. Just putting the base together, I had to do a lot of sanding because of stray wood glue, and I had to use the vice in the basement to get the post into the base completely. Cutting the little wooden rods that I used as connectors and axles to the right length was also a bit of a problem, mostly because I didn’t realize how precise some of them needed to be, so I needed to sand them a lot to get them down to the right length. I also had a lot of trouble getting my crank handle secure, so I had to shorten it a lot and clamp it hard overnight. When I came back to it though, it was a little too hard to turn. Instead of dealing with it right away I just started sanding the rest of the mechanism, as my wave had started brushing against my ship too much and my metal piece was rubbing against the post in my small wheel. Luckily, as I was doing that (and it took a while) the handle loosened up a lot – not as much as I would’ve liked, but enough to be acceptable. Finally, I added the large piece of water to the base and superglued the knots in my twine to make it more secure.

Final Product:

        

Overall, I’m pretty happy with how my model turned out. There are some imperfections that still bother me, like the fact that I had to sand all of the paint (and a decent chunk of  the wood) off of the back of my wave to make it turn smoothly, the fact that my ship looks a little too high, the wave isn’t as synced with the rocking as I’d like, and one of the peaks of my water isn’t as light as the rest, not to mentions some nicks in my wood, but I still had a lot of fun building it. I really was surprised by how long it took to build my final model, especially by how much sanding I had to do once I thought I was almost done. As a whole though, this project made me realize how much I’ve learned so far and just what I’m able to do if I set my mind to it, which is pretty cool. (The gif on the side here shows how it looks moving, though it’s a little rough because I was at a weird angle.)