Monday 14 February 2011

FMP - One (14/02/11)

Well today marked the first day that I physically start my FMP, after having spent too much time bogged down with my External Brief referral.

For my FMP I'm building a working carousel based on the works of Dr Seuss, this entails that the overall design will be asymmetrical, wonky and colourful. Having become bored of the perfect finish needed for product models, this freedom to allow certain angles or corners be off is a welcome addition. After putting some serious thought into the chosen mechanism I'll be using I opted for a curved CAM, as you'll see in the photos. Choosing this over the other options which include a CAM above the figures, and a similar curved CAM at the top, this design involves less, which of course means there is less to go wrong.

Having only drawn up these designs, I needed to put it to physical test so today I focused on a working mock up. The initial design is incredibly straightforward, a curved/hilly CAM sits underneath the rotating base which has poles running through it which meet the CAM. As the base rotates these poles are in turn rotated and move up and down according to the height of the CAM underneath it at that time, as seen in the photos: the curved CAM was lasercut and then heatbent around a former of a similar circumference (a mistake in finding the circumference of the circle resulted in the piece coming up short, this will be fixed tomorrow):


The rotating structure on top which houses the poles and figures:


The extra rings at the base keep the poles on the CAM so that they don't slide off either side, a new design will be looked into to fix this as these rings sometimes lipped the pole resulting in it not following the CAM as seen in the two following photos, firstly it working how it should:


The pole becoming stuck at a height:


One way to prevent the pole from sliding off either side is to attach a secondary base disc which fits tightly around the centre point (the larger pole), as you can see in the above photos the the middle gap in the base disc is a lot larger. The new disc is the black one:


Currently this mock up relies on me turning it for it to work, of course on the final one it will be powered by a motor. To get the ideal rotations per minute I've had to buy a gearbox motor, sadly the one I brought isn't powerful enough and I'm waiting for the larger model (which RMP is dependent on voltage) to be delivered, For now though this motor will do and allows me to design ways of how to connect it to the centre pole which rotates the entire thing. The circuit design is final, just a straightforward power source, switch and motor:



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