Ahoy! I shall be writin’ this only in pirate natter! Ahoy aboard, scallywags!

Just kidding, that would be awful.

*Notice: If I inserted pictures of every individual step, this would be approximately 6.022 * 10^23 pages long, so I only included as many pictures as I believed was necessary.

Welcome to my midterm project. To begin, I based my design on mechanical movements 100 and 138 in the 507 mechanical movements index, which can be seen below. Movement 100 was a quick return lever, and 138 was a cam that translated rotational motion into different translational motions.

I decided to pair the two movements together because I had an awesome idea for a sail boat riding on turbulent seas as the main aesthetic of the project. With this in mind, I began to model my device in SolidWorks

I started out modeling my device in SolidWorks because I had previous experience with it and felt very comfortable forming my ideas in 3D rather than 2D. Additionally, SolidWorks drawings can be easily exported as .ai files for the laser cutter, so it wasn’t a hassle to get my pieces ready for cutting.

In SolidWorks, I first began by creating the base of my device, which would consist of a three flat planks glued on top of each other with slots for a vertical plank that would hold the moving parts.

Next, I created the quick return lever, and the wheel it attached to. After that, I made the cam out of a random spline shape I created, along with the rod that it would push up and down. After adding guides and dowels for the wheels and handles, my CAD was finished, ready for my first check in. From here, I exported all of the drawings as .ai files so I could open them in illustrator.

Dr. Wettergreen suggested that I create a cam based off of a shape that fit my theme more readily. What’s kinda round and found in the ocean? A scallop shell! Woo! Additionally, I created a wave pattern for the quick return lever, and a pirate ship for the final cam rod (Pirate ship found here). All of this was done in Illustrator.

From here, I was ready to begin prototyping. First, I cut out the parts of the cam in cardboard. I assembled them with hot glue, and checked to see that they fit together well. The cam didn’t work well, but I wasn’t really expecting it to work as smoothly as wood would.

After testing that things would fit together somewhat well, I set out to make the real shell out of 3/8 in steel. I chose to use 3/8 inch steel because that would allow the edge to contact the entirety of the rod’s point. Using the plasma cutter at 10 speed, I cut out the shell. It required heavy post processing to see its true beauty, including a significant amount of angle grinding, filing, and lots of time on the grindstone in the machine shop to flatten the edges.

After post-processing the shell and making it pretty, I hot glued the cardboard cutout to it to use as a template for the center hole. I then drilled a 1/2 inch hole in the steel for a dowel to fit into.

After drilling the hole, I sanded down the edges of the hole, and then move on to create a medium fidelity prototype of the device. For this prototype, I cut the pieces out of wood, and assembled them with hot glue. The quick return lever worked flawlessly, but the cam was much more difficult. The rod kept getting stuck on the geometries of the shell.

I tried sanding the rod so that it fell more smoothly, and smoothing out the edges of the shell, as well as changing the shape the rod tip. However, it still got stuck in many places. After more sanding/smoothing, I decided to change the location of the rod so that it was easier to lift with the geometries of the shell. I moved over the rod to the right so that more of the force from the shell turning would be in the upwards direction instead of torquing the rod side-to-side. This had the downside of only turning in one direction, but I made sure to indicate that in my final product. In the picture below, you can see the rod guides are moved over.

Once this worked, I was ready to assemble everything and paint. I had to re-cut a pirate ship rod because it wasn’t long enough at first to reach all parts of the shell. Additionally, I re-cut the prototype lever with the waves this time. I painted most of the moving parts blue with spray paint to look like water, and I painted the base with “almond” color to look like sand. For each set of spray painting, I put 2-3 coats and a final clear coat. For  the base, I also added some small spritz of a darker tan, to give it a grainy look. During this time, I also sandblasted my shell, and put a clear coat on it.

On the pirate ship, I stained the main wood with cherry stain, and spray painted the sail black. Additionally, I cut acrylic circles to put in the port holes. I also clear-coated the stained part and the sail. I assembled everything, super-glued parts together, and tested it. However, I ran into a problem. There was one spot on the shell that caught on the pirate ship rod. So, I had to use glue remover (seen with the shell above) to take off the shell so I could grind down that spot. After doing so, I decided to reattach the pieces with some tallow between parts to facilitate movement, which helped as well.

Now, I was done with the device.

I continued to add small aesthetic pieces, such as crests on the waves, starfish in the sand, and kelp bushes. For these, I just used acrylic paints that we had. I also added some “booty”, which was requested by Serena. I laser cut a treasure chest, stained it, painted it with acrylic, and glued it to the device. In addition, I cut small dowel pieces and spray painted them gold to look like doubloons, and glued them on as well.

Now, I was done.