Over the course of the past month, Mary and I have brainstormed, prototyped, troubleshooted, and prototyped some more, to recreate Mechanical Movement 24 (of the 507 Mechanical Movements) through our vision of a Jones victory for this year’s soon to arrive Beer Bike.

PLANNING

Our first steps for the midterm project were to brainstorm a theme for our prototype and the accompanying mechanical movement(s) that would allow us to execute that theme. Both being at a college with a heavily emphasized Beer Bike culture and also juniors who have yet to experience a normal Beer Bike, we wanted to channel our excitement for this semester into this midterm project. We especially thought that this would be a cool opportunity since we could use gears to transmit circular motion to mimic that of a bike going around a track. We originally wanted to incorporate the chugging element of the relay race as well, but were (rightly) worried about biting off more than we could chew with incorporating a second movement in.

To be on track with the schedule for the assignment, by the first week we’d have a draft sketch and supporting Illustrator files, by week two we would have our medium fidelity prototype of cardboard and wooden dowels as a proof of concept of our motion, and then spend the rest of the time working on our final prototype. To follow each of our prototypes for this process, check out this slide deck.

EARLY PROTOTYPING

Our earliest draft of this project would include two bikes that would allow two users to “race” different bikes around the same track — logistically, this would not end up working out on different planes with the same vertical axis without one interfering with the other’s movement. We cut this down to one bike and considered different options originally to create a more oval-like motion that more closely resembles that of a track, before settling on a simple system of two spur gears.

We drafted the Adobe Illustrator files for these gears, and laser cut them with cardboard to get a sense of size, and to check the meshing of the gears, moving forward once we confirmed that the gears moved together, and that the track on top would fit around our larger gear. This also allowed us to figure out how big we would need to make our base to fit all of our components fully on.

FINAL PROTOTYPE

Our final prototype consisted of laser cut plywood pieces, with vinyl cut details on the bike and on the track. For stability, we made our gears of two layers of plywood and our base with three.

We engraved on the lanes on the “track” through the laser cutter as well. Our gears and base were stained to be a dark walnut color, while the bike track and supporting dowels were stained with a black stain to get closer to the gray color of the actual track surface. The purple vinyl on the bike was attached to the surface of a green-spray painted bike shape outline to be Jones colors and finished with a top coat of clear spray paint, and the white vinyl shows the start/finish of the track.

A user should be able to spin the smaller gear using the attached peg to move the bike around the track, demonstrating Mechanical Movement #24!

IN HINDSIGHT

While I am really excited at the project that we created, I think that timeliness is always something that comes up as deadlines approach, and would have been significantly less stressed if we had started assembly earlier than we did, with the long waiting periods of wood glue drying time in mind. I think working in partners made this a lot more feasible, and am super appreciative of Mary for making team-working on this so easy in regards to both work delegation and communication.

COST ANALYSIS

Plywood (~32″x32″)……………………..$12.00

Vinyl (<1 sq ft)…………………………….$0.79

Dowels (<3 ft)……………………………..$5.00

Total Material $$…………………………$17.79

Overall, this project would not cost much more than our previous assignments in terms of materials, but I would expect more from labor given the creative nature of the project. I did not include costs of either the laser cutting machine or the vinyl cutter, but even if one would need to go to a maker space to rent these tools, the cut time totaled to less than an hour, and I don’t imagine it costing upward of $40. I didn’t include labor costs, because I wasn’t quite sure how to incorporate the planning time, or what was an appropriate split of labor cost between two people, but I might set a rate of what I think I deserve to be around $10-12/hour to create this finished product. Something fun I thought I might use to look at labor cost was how much people make from making wooden toys — and while this didn’t provide me with an hourly wage, it was cool to see that there’s a market for it!