"Planetary Navigator" Steampunk Pipe

[Mayo]

Hopefully the whole mechanism won't go "Up in Smoke" if it gets too much heat. Very cool design!

[gabrielleigh]

This is probably a stupid question to most, but how do you calculate the gears so that the teeth mesh properly when using a small diameter gear to a large diameter gear such as in the picture?

Well, Chris designed this particular mechanism, but I use a gear creating plugin in Google Sketchup Pro to make gears for my other projects. The plugin I use creates uniform teeth for any size gear, so whatever gears you make will mesh perfectly.

I ran into some problems with tight clearances when I cut the first prototype, so I went into the cut file and simply reduced the diameter of the small drive gear by a few thousandths of an inch to give me a little more "play" between the two gears. That got rid of the binding problem I was seeing with the first prototype.

Like any machine, things may appear perfect "on paper"... but once you cut the parts and assemble the machine, you are bound to find problems that can't easily be predicted by looking at the virtual parts on the screen.

[gabrielleigh]

nice pipe... However who in their right mind would smoke anything it that nice of a pipe.
how much time did you spend on it.. also what is steam punk <<< remember i retired from the navy with 30 years so public life i have very little knowledge about. most of my service was out of country. I am assuming it is a term used sort of like we used hippi...

again nice pipe..

Well, the hard part of this project was all done by Chris and the people who contributed to his final iris design. I can't imagine the hours that went into all that work.

The pipe itself was pretty straightforward. I used the "Offset selected vectors" button to make the basic shape of the pipe body based around the iris design the other guys came up with. I added some toolpaths to bore out some holes for the tobacco under the iris. I grabbed a shareware celtic knot pattern off the web and ran it through some filters in Gimp and then fitted some vectors to the design. I made a quick v-carve toolpath to cut the cool celtic work after that.

Aside from that, I had to spend some time optimizing the iris design and adjusting the hole sizes to fit some brass pins I was making to hold the whole mechanism together. It probably took me six or eight hours of computer work to come up with a finished set of files to cut out the entire pipe.

[gabrielleigh]

I googled steampunk... that about norm around here... men wear suspenders all the time and women wear those long dress... we actually have a steam powered sawmill about 3 miles from my shop...most of the old timers around here wore beaver top hats... pike county ky is about 40 years behind times... lol... i think a time warp happened here...

Yeah, steampunk is pretty much a fashion term. There are various groups of people who enjoy displaying a very noticeable "theme" to their fashion choice. You may have heard of terms like "gothic" and "grunge"... steampunk simply refers to the affinity for anything that appears to come from the 1800's era industrial revolution theme. There are lots of varieties of steampunk out there, but pretty much anything with gears, leather, and cool mechanized gizmos will fall into the steampunk category. Think "Rube Goldberg meets Jules Verne" and you can't go wrong.

[mikeacg]

Just came across this today from another post! Very cool and definitely an 'out-of-the-box' use for the mechanism...