The Fantastic Work of Bob Potts
Recently, while cruising through Youtube, I came across some of the amazing Kinetic Sculptures by Bob Potts. Check them out below:
A quick look at the Solar Water Heater
The concept of a solar water heater is simple:Â use the sun to heat up the water. Black tubing is very good at absorbing sunlight. We just need to pump the water through some black tubing. Of course, that tubing takes up a lot of space, so I prefer to put it on the roof, so …read more
Lily Pad Pool Warmers
For the past year and a half we’ve been heating our pool with a solar water heater. It pumps the water to the roof, where it runs through black tubes, which absorb as much warmth from the sunlight as possible. This solution has raised our pool temp by about 8ËšF. But, it does nothing to …read more
An Intimate Look Under the Tablecloth
I whipped up a video of the engineering magic behind A Moveable Feast. Enjoy!
Taking it to the Streets
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
Tidying up the details before Showtime
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
Gliding Our Way to the Finish
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
Suspension and Drivetrain
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
Framing Begins
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
More Wheel Work
We made some great progress today on the kinetic sculpture. I’m going to let the pictures tell the story.