Pickleball!!

• Caroline Graham

Pickleball!! By Caroline Graham and Surina Kishinchandani

We decided to make a pickleball court for our midterm project. We wanted the two players to move up and down and the ball to move back and forth. We started by looking into the 507 Mechanical Movements and planning out how to make our vision possible. We identified that the players could be connected to the dowel that causes the rotation, but that the ball would need to be moving parallel to it, so would need a perpendicular gear to drive this movement. We found right angle gears to be our solution (our inspiration shown below). This also coincided with Mechanical Movement #25.

We created sketches to visualize our plan. The nautilus gears (Movement #96) allow the players to be pushed up vertically and then drop back down after they hit the ball. The crank and slotted link (Movement #158) moves the ball back and forth between the players by having the short rod fixed on a center joint and the other rotating around gear to limit the motion of the “ball” at the top.

 

We then created a low fidelity prototype by laser cutting cardboard and plywood pieces. We used plywood for the right angle gear to test functionality. We also laser cut our joints to begin the struggle of finding the best press fit size.

Through our low fidelity demonstration, we were able to identify that the ball didn’t get as far lateral movement as we had hoped. We iterated by moving the fixed joint closer to the gear to allow the shaft to reach a completely direct position. This improved the range of motion for the ball. The gear attached to the rotating dowel that drives the motion was also smaller than the gear for the ball shaft in this prototype. We shifted to a one to one gear ratio for our medium fidelity prototype to allow the players to go up once during the full rotation of the ball. We also observed that the players had a tendency to fall off the nautilus gears and were not driven directly vertically when only supported by the opening in the top. This led us to include additional supports closer to the nautilus gears, so the player bases are aligned at two points.

We made the mentioned adjustments for our medium fidelity prototype. We laser cut all pieces out of wood, no longer using cardboard. We included press fit bearings in this prototype. We also made press fit supports to hold the lid (shown above to the right) to allow easy removal of the top to access the gears. Overall, we were able to test different fits and found greater success with press fitting the stands into the base and the joints together, no longer needing to use tape. We also made the nautilus gears larger to cause greater movement for the players.

We also began creating our metal pieces. We decided to have it be the handle and say “Game On”. This is not only functional, but also adds a fun, amusing element. We began by designing the handle in Adobe Illustrator, before importing it into the waterjet software. We experienced some issues with the garnet pipe being jammed from previous use of the waterjet, which was resolved by emptying out the garnet container, cleaning the openings, and refilling with help from a lab technician. We test cut on a piece of aluminum and finally were able to cut out our handle with the words legible! 

A video demonstration of our medium fidelity prototype is shown below:

We then moved on to developing our high fidelity prototype, including acrylic and vinyl elements. First, we played around with larger teeth for the right angle gears to try to produce a smoother motion. We would have to move the positions for the stands holding the gears, and with the trial we did, we didn’t see significant enough improvement to make this shift. We went back to our previous gears.

We performed our last laser cutting with wood, cutting the pickle players (how cute!). For our vinyl elements, we decorated the pickleball paddles and the ball. We used the Cricut for the vinyl elements. We wanted to add a personalized touch to the pickle players, so we cut out our initials on each player’s paddle. For a pop of color, we cut out the vinyl for the ball in yellow.

 

We also completed other post processing including sand blasting the metal piece and spray painting it. We sand-blasted the aluminum in order to get an even surface on the metal so it would turn out uniform when spray-painted. We chose to spray paint the handle blue to match the color of pickleball courts! We also stained the wood with Tung Oil to bring out its natural grain without making its color differ too much from the inside of the box since we wanted to show the gears moving through clear acrylic.

Finally, we wanted to have our front side be clear acrylic, to allow the user to see how the gears are interacting. We made several test cuts to find appropriate settings where there was no flame (15s, 55p, 100f, 4 cycles). In the second cut there was some fogginess on the acrylic caused by the heat from the engraving. To reduce this, we added painters tape to the top side, as advised by a lab technician. We saw the desired improvement. We then cut out our front piece!

We assembled the box! Although we were expecting many challenges with press fitting the acrylic to the wood, we were pleasantly surprised with the fit. We glued the pickles on to their bases, and clamped them as they dried.

 

 

And with everything assembled, the pickleball game was brought to life!

A video demonstration of our high fidelity prototype is shown below: 

High Fidelity Video Demonstration

Picture of clean workspace:

Cost Breakdown:

  • Labor
    • 50 hours total x $10/hr = $500
  • Tools
    • Laser cutter, sand-blaster, bandsaw, waterjet cutter, Adobe Illustrator: Part of Maker Space one-month membership = $50
  • Materials
  • Total cost of project: $675.59 
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