For this project, I decided to make use a simple gear mechanism with a 90 degree gear turn in order to spin the light at the top of a lighthouse. This idea came to me as I was walking towards coffeehouse and I was reminded of the building downtown that has a very large and bright spotlight at the top. With this idea in place, I went to the internet to find inspiration. Upon seeing a design, I modeled my lighthouse on Illustrator. Once the design was finalized and cut, assembly began. What started as an easy assembly turned into a nightmare as I began to stain all of my pieces. The whole staining process probably took around 6-8 hours but it did make my lighthouse look really cool.
The stain was then reassembled and I began to glue the different parts together. One of the big issues I ran into was that the laser cutter actually was cutting at a 6 degree angle, making my precise slots slanted. This slanted my entire tower and made pieces harder to put together but after sanding and forcing pieces together, I managed to finish the assembly.
The mechanism was then put into place. For this, the most difficult part was getting the 90 degree gears to be in line and at the right height. I had to put in some set screws and spacers in order to help with the fact that the 90 degree gears were extremely heavy. This made the vertical shaft top heavy and prone to tipping.
The final section to be added was the user crank. This was plasma cut for the wheel and glued onto one of the 90 degree gears.
I had tons of trouble getting the whole thing to align and making sure that all the gears turned but ultimately my design panned out and worked.
This project cost probably tons of money. Assuming a US average hourly wage of $23/hour, the labor cost would roughly be $345 since I spent at least 15 hours working on this. Add the license cost of $20 and material costs of $50, the total cost of this project would be $415. Pretty expensive. If I had to do this again, I would make the design simpler, the gear mechanism completely in one plane, and not focus too much on the staining process. However, I really like how this lighthouse looks and I enjoyed putting it together.
