I recently took some video of a project that I’ve slowly been working on for the past few months. Â It’s a double pendulum made of solid brass. I wanted to see if using proper bearings would create a nice frictionless chaotic pendulum. Â I wasn’t disappointed. Â By tightening the machine screw on the top pivot point …read more
Recently, while cruising through Youtube, I came across some of the amazing Kinetic Sculptures by Bob Potts. Check them out below:
I whipped up a video of the engineering magic behind A Moveable Feast. Enjoy!
With all of the different elements of the Kinetic Sculpture in place it was time to do some laps around the parking lot to see what would break. We’ve literally got lots of moving parts, so it’s important to see what we need to fix. It’s much easier to repair a broken spoke in the …read more
We had only had 14 days until the Doo Dah Parade, and we had a long way to go, so we stepped things up into high gear. I started working every day and recruited as many helpers each day as possible. I didn’t take time out of my day to blog, as I needed all …read more
We’ve been working two or three days a week on this thing. This means we’ve been making a lot of progress, but I haven’t had the time to blog about it much. Let me see if I can catch things up to something remotely current… We finally got started on the driveshaft. We welded it …read more
We cut out a large steel frame for the table top. This will be a weight bearing aspect of the frame, so we used our beefy stuff. We welded up a nice rectangle a few inches smaller than what our table will be and put it on top of our wooden jigs. We just needed …read more
After hacking up the bicycle frames to distill them into just the parts that we’re going to use, it was time to start welding the basics of the frame together. I purchased 120′ of 1 1/2″ x 1/16″ wall chromoly tubing. Alloy 4130 for those keeping score at home. I’ve also got some 3/4″ tube …read more
We had a vague idea of how things are supposed to go together. But, eventually, we’ll have to actually do it. I took some measurements of the parts I was planning to use and started to put them into Google’s Sketchup. It has a little bit of a learning curve, but the tutorials were helpful …read more
We finished crimping in the spokes for our wheels. Over 196 spokes to make and then mount into the 4 wheels. Luckily we won’t have to do that again. We bought an old golf cart that we hope to use for steering and suspension parts. I threw all of the plastic away and removed the …read more