I ran across some kinetic sculptures in my search for what to do for this midterm that seemed to sneak up on me.

I found this video along with other similar motions and I thought they were unique. In my head, I figured that the motion was relatively simple, that I would create a working simple model with more time to spend on aesthetics. There was even a model of this movement making little model soccer fans do an Ole wave. I avoided that model as I wasn’t sure how I was going to make little people and I knew I was going to obsess about putting them in little Arsenal jerseys.

 

Well I made an outline drawing in Illustrator, presented it to Dr. Wettergreen. He looked at it a bit and told me how it worked and what specific movement it was.

CAM:

Later I would realize that I had no idea how it worked. When it came to the prototyping phase I glued every piece together and remained perplexed about the lack of movement in the model. It wouldn’t budge when I twisted the handle… It was almost as if every moving part had been glue down to one another. When I removed the glue and tried again the bars kept jumping their cam.

I decided that the model was way too large and reduced the size by 50%. Additionally, I created spacers to go on each rod to ensure a more precise and accurate spacing on the model.

Unfortunately, the spacers got in the way of the moving parts and made the model extremely difficult to move. I then attempted to measure and glue the cams without spacers. I spent a lot of time measuring, gluing, removing wood glue with acetone, re-measuring, and re-gluing… in vain. The pieces kept on jumping track. So it was either the panels jump track or they are on the track but do not move at all. I essentially made two models and decided on the moving track jumping model.

I also spent a lot of time designing wave patterns to fit on my model. Of course, the Great Wave off Kanagawa was much too complex and small to pull off. Thankfully I didn’t have enough time to cut and place the designs for each panel. You would hardly be able to see the designs anyway.

 

The final design sort of works and looks nice, just not in the way that I envisioned.