Day 7: More Birds!

Today we get to present our birds in class! My partner, Lisa, and I fully assembled our bird the day before, and we ran into a few complications. The "body" we made for our bird didn't fit quite perfectly, so we had to make a few modifications. First, when we turned the crank our wings were too close to the backs of the two support pieces we made for them, and so we had to sand down the edges to make them rounded which made it easier for the wings to turn. We then decided to make the two piano wires we press-fitted into the Delrin rod at the wings closer together so that the wings wouldn't wobble around. This helped a little, but as we kept cranking the mechanism we realized that the tips of the wings kept tapping the table. It wasn't really a huge deal, but it bothered us enough that we sawed off the last part of the wings. This solved our problems, and we could decorate our bird! Since the Delrin is white, we decided to just stick with white and made our bird into a swan, naming it Natalie (if you've seen Black Swan, you understand).

Cute, right? We certainly like her. Some thoughts after assembly: I'm officially a huge fan of the piano wire. It's so easy to work with, and doesn't require reprinting all of your parts on the laser printer each time you need to change something. However, I would not recommend using the piano wire method if precision is imperative. The drill doesn't drill the same way each time, and the holes can be off if it doesn't go in straight. For our purposes, it was great.

Day 6: More Birds than Hitchcock Can Count

We've been working hard to design our bird parts in SolidWorks, and we haven't run into any kinks.

Luckily for us, a lot of our design uses piano wire connectors and Delrin rod, which doesn't involve SolidWorks at all. I think this is an advantage--we can adapt more easily if we run into any problems because we don't need to print out more Delrin pieces.

This picture shows the hinge mechanism we've designed for the wings. the white pieces have a hole that allows the gray Delrin rod to rotate freely.

The wire on the right goes through the Delrin rod and the circle gear. The wire will be attached to a Delrin rod and will serve as the crank handle to turn the gear.

Our next step is to design a body structure to hold everything in place. My partner and I made the parts in SolidWorks and will cut them out tomorrow night. Pictures to follow!

Day 5: The Bird Continued

We've been hard at work on our bird (or, rather, our flapping mechanism). My partner and I drew more sketches before formulating a solid idea.

Our though is to have a long Delrin rod attached to a gear move back and forth while hinged wings move up and down.

This mechanism has more dynamic movement than a simple horizontal motion. The end (which has the wings attached) moves in a circular path up and forward, then down and back.

My partner and I thought that this would represent a more realistic, bird-like flying motion. So far, we really like what we see. Next post will be about our design in SolidWorks and some laser cut pieces.

A Video of our Working Bottle Opener

Stylish and functional!!

Day 4: Bottle Openers Due

Today our bottle openers were due! My partner and I are super psyched about ours, which we've named "Purple Pride," because we are the Purple Class of 2014 here at Wellesley. We cut our design out of 3/16 inch Delrin so it isn't too thick, but very sturdy.

The almost complete SolidWorks design.

The complete design, made into a part.

ALL DONE!!

 Looks good, right? We think so. With a little bedazzling, it will be quite girly.

Other designs from my classmates:

Rudolf the Red-Nosed Reindeer

The Ergonomic Bottle Opener

The Happy Helper

Easy Credit: the same size as a standard credit card.

The Necklace Bottle Opener (wonderfully showcased by Juliette)

Day 2 Continued

We're almost done with designing our bottle opener in SolidWorks! On Friday, when we've finally gotten all the numbers designed, we'll cut it out of plastic with the laser cutter and see how it works. Today, we quickly made a super-simple bottle opener just to make sure the zero in our "2014" will work well. It does! With a little filing and some shaping with the Exacto-knife, our model was very reliable.

 As you can see from the pictures, our bottle opener can be used in a variety of ways.

On Friday we will have the finished project!

Day 3: Birds

For the first half of class today, we started a new topic: creating bird-like machines. They have to have some sort of body and wings that flap when a crank is turned. After quickly Googling birds, I came up with this model:

In this model, the cam on top spins around, and each time around it pushes a piston attached to the wings down. As the piston moves down, the wings move up. The weight of the wings naturally makes them fall back down.

To illustrate this point to my partner, I ran around like a crazy person and quickly set up a LEGO model:

Although the model is a bit crude, it works exactly the way it should. In the bird, the cam (which is a oblong shape) would go where my hand is in the photo above. Here is a video of my "bird" in action:   We had to come up with 4 more designs, each with a different mechanism. These first three pictures use a "chomping" motion. Two rods are joined together at a point, allowing them to open and close in a chomping motion. A cam  pushes on one of the rods, making the "mouth" open and close. The rod that moves is attached to another by a hinge and as the end of the rod moves down, the second moves up, and vice versa. This simulates a flapping motion. These next three pictures are another design, this time using an axis to turn the wings up and down. We need to iron out some kinks... These two pictures are diagrams of our fourth machine. This one also has a few kinks, but essentially a large gear would rotate in the center and it would be turning two smaller gears attached to the wings, making them flap. Unfortunately with this design, one wing would go up as the other went down, and it would also not work with a crank (which is one of our requirements).    This is a pretty cool design my partner made. Instead of traditional "flapping" wings, the wings in this design extend. In these diagrams, there is a large gear in the middle working the wings. After my classes today I went to the lab and fiddled around with  extending methods, and I came up with a workable model. Instead of a gear, I used string attached to a pole that moves horizontally, pulling the wings up and down, making them extend. I don't think it works as well as my first model, but it looks pretty darn awesome.