I started off by editing my files and remaking pretty much all of my files in solidworks and then importing them into illustrator, so they’d be much more accurate. I also made a low fidelity prototype, just to get a feel for how all the parts went together and gain some understanding of how the mechanism worked. I then sent my parts to the laser cutter:

I started gluing together all of the pieces that needed to be thicker and stable. I originally thought that would only be the 2 stanchions and the toothed wheel, but later on I discovered that wasn’t true. The 2 stanchions went together pretty easily. I aligned them and stuck bolts through the holes, which made all the edges clean:

 

The toothed wheels were much much harder. They only had one hole, so they were impossible to align. I tried first using wood glue and the gear looked very nice and I stuck it in the vice and came back in a couple hours, and then I noticed it had slipped, so I recut and tried again. This time I tried it with hot glue, but it still didn’t work, it just set too fast. I then decided to alter my files to have a bunch of essentially pointless holes that I could stick bolts through as it was drying so that way the teeth would stay perfectly aligned.

Misaligned teeth: first try

Misaligned teeth: second try (slightly better, but still not good)

Once the glue on the stanchions dried, I drilled holes through the sides that I could pass dowels through and into the base:

 

Then I made the little crank handle out of a 1/2 in dowel and a 1/4 in dowel.

  

Now that I had all my parts gathered together, I started assembling everything on the plank. I measured it out a little bit (this was a mistake, I really should’ve measured more) and started drilling holes for the stanchion dowels and glued them down.

  

Then I placed the second stanchion:

 

Once both of those stanchions were placed on the board, I started a rough assembly with nuts and bolts and a few dowels so it was modular and easy to put together:

  

There was a big problem with this assembly. It was just so wobbly and the drive arms just constantly moved back and forth and it kind of remotely worked.

I really wanted to fix it, so I talked to Dr. Wettergreen, and decided to make my toothed gear stanchion thicker and closer to the other stanchion, made by drive arms thicker, and I started connected everything with dowels so everything was much more secure. Also I noticed that the tooth picks straight through the dowel by themselves were holding things on slightly askew so I replaced them with these little circles of wood which I used in addition to toothpicks or just with glue.

You can see the thicker stanchion here:

Thicker drive arms:

Dowel connections and circle connectors:

As I was assembling this, I had treated every piece with linseed oil, and I really liked that finish, so I didn’t want to add in another surface treatment You can also see that I sanded all of the stanchion sides. I really liked the light sides in contrast with the laser burned sides of the arms, so I decided to leave that be.

All of the tips Dr. Wettergreen gave me worked, and the assembly was pretty much wobble free. I also decided to leave off the crank handle I had made because it looked silly:

vs.

The (almost) finished product:

Then I added another base plank because I thought it would look nice and made the base wider and more stable. I glued it on, and also made myself a little name plate:

Then I was finally happy with the aesthetics of the project as well as the wobble free motion, so I was all done: