When I set out to make this project I had two major goals. The first was to make something that worked very well. The second was to try a couple finishing/post processing things I had never done before. Now that I am at the end I think I definitely met my goals and it was quite an adventure getting there.

First I had to decide what sort of movement I wanted. I considered all the gear based projects and realized that most of them had major struggles as a result of the gears. In order to meet my first goal I settled on movement 92 from 507 Mechanical movements since it seemed like the right blend of what I had time to do, what would let me try some things and still be a challenge. Next I set out to do my 2-D drawings. My first draft of these you can check out in my 2-D drawings post. This gave me an opportunity to explore the functions of illustrator. Next I had to think about the scale I wanted this to have. I settled on a roughly 4-inch wheel mostly so it would have a large radius of rotation since I suspected that would make things easier to rotate later. Once I sized my wheel everything else needed to be based on that so I set out resizing all my other parts. It was during this resizing that I realized my original plan was not going to work. I had planned to place my wheel in the very front and have it rotate to raise a flag. The problem with this was the wheel needs an axle going out the back in order for it to spin. This makes it physically impossible for a flag to be located behind the wheel since the axle would be in the way. I did a quick mental model and then moved the flag to in front of the wheel which made my physical design much more feasible.

 

Now it was time for cardboard models. I cut everything out of cardboard and did my best to put it together. The result was mixed. I realized my “flag pole” was going to twist if I did not make it thicker. I also realized that the “arm” that raises the flag as the wheel spins was too short. It needs to be longer than the diameter of the wheel at the very least. I also noticed that if the “arm” is not in perfect plane with the wheel the rotation will dramatically increase the friction at some points. Now it was time to move from cardboard to wood. The wooden models went very similarly to the cardboard. I decided to make the “arm” slightly larger even and realized that I needed to resize some dowel holes in order to make the dowels friction fit into the model. I also realized that I needed a thicker base in order to ensure the back that holds up the wheel does not bend. I re cut some wooden pieces and put it together and it worked! Just as I was starting to feel good, disaster struck.

Right after making my last cut for the functional wooden one my flash drive died. Honestly I panicked for about 30 minutes. I emailed Dr. Wettergreen, called Adulfo and spent a bit of time frantically pacing around the computer lab. I had 48 hours till the deadline and all my work was gone. After working out the immediate stress I decided that no matter what, I might as well remake the wheel drawing so that I could go ahead and use the water jet with Adulfo. I had my working wooden pieces so I grabbed a set of calipers and rebuilt it the wheel in Illustrator using the calipers and the tools. To my amazement, the wheel took only 30 minutes to remake accurately which is at least 2 hours down from my first try. Turns out what I had been learning with illustrator had made me more efficient. I cut the wheel out on the water jet and then Adulfo introduced me to a program called the Noun Project to help me remake my Ferris wheel carriages. This saved me a lot of time since I didn’t have to remake the carriage. I decided to go ahead and take care of the carriages while I was there since lab assistants would be leaving soon. I used the plasa cutter to make some carriages that resembled “shrek heads” apparently but I can live with that. Then I decided to try and laser engrave a design on them. I trial ran 3 of them and when I was satisfied with the laser cutter I created the 4 I wanted to use. The next 3 hours consisted of me, my wooden cut out, and a set of calipers rebuilding my files. I must say it was a little painstaking. Dr. Wettergreen had graciously offered me more time but I was getting a little obsessed with getting this done. Once I remade the files I cut them out and started painting.

The spray painting was an interesting challenge. I wanted the wheel to be colorful since a ferris wheel theme seemed like it should be colorful. I decided to hand paint it since the amount of tape required to do a 3-color spray paint job seemed very wasteful. While may paint dried I applied a mahogany stain to the base and the backboard to give it a nice dark finish and create a contrast between the colors and the back. As things dried, I started gluing pieces together. The glue had to go in a very specific order of operations in order to guarantee that all the pieces could fit together. The flag slider had to be glued before the flag pole could be installed and the wheel had to be combined before the wheel was inserted through the back. I wanted to use wood glue since it dries as strong as the wood after 12 hours. I set it to dry overnight and in the morning came to glue the last few pieces and do some finishing work. I ended up spending most of the day gluing small pieces together since the wood glue needs at least an hour clamped before I move on. When all the glue was dry enough for me to work with the model I got the Vaseline and smeared several globs along the shaft, between the flag slider and between parts of the wheel. I finished off with mild paint touch ups to make things look a little better.

All in all I loved this project. I have been admiring other peoples projects since I matriculated and I was greatly looking forward to doing my own. I learned a lot about how to metal engrave, how to use the water jet cutter and the thought process that goes into making things in three dimensions. The loss of the flash drive briefly demoralized me but in the end I recovered and actually made the due date. I am proud of this project and I hope OEDK users enjoy looking at it.

 

Cost

1/4 inch birch plywood: $5/sheet * 2 sheets = $10

1/4 inch Aluminum sheet: 1X1 ft = $40

1/32 inch Aluminum sheet: 0.5 ft X 0.5 ft = $10

Labor: 22 hours * $10/hr = $220

 

Total: $280