"Planetary Navigator" Steampunk Pipe

I have been toiling away in my studio trying to get this prototype finished for a customer. I finally got the thing together today and I am quite happy with it. What you see below is representative of "steampunk" style artwork.

This is one of the world's only mechanized smoking accessories, and likely the only one that features a fully-operational, completely wooden mechanism. The mechanism is a gear-driven iris like what you will find in cameras (especially older ones). The entire mechanism concept comes from Chris Schaie, with contributions from Michael Schnorr and quite a few other Shopbot forum members. The thread with all of the inspirational ideas and photos can be found here:

http://www.talkshopbot.com/forum/showthread.php?t=795

Thanks again to the people who created these mechanisms, I think it is amazing that people can collaborate to come up with cool things like this iris mechanism. Even more amazing is the fact that people freely share these ideas so other people can piddle around with them and come up with neat applications for them!

I have linked a few different views of the pipe so that you can see pretty much every aspect of how it looks and how it functions. I took the basic "gear drive" principal that Chris and the other guys came up with and I modified it to include a very industrial-feeling wooden knob that spins on an axle which runs through the middle of the green drive gear. I machined a spiral cut groove onto the knob so that you have good grip when you twist it between your fingers to actuate the iris mechanism. All the screws that adorn the pipe are brass, which goes along with the whole steampunk theme.

The upper body of the pipe was machined from a slab of african bloodwood, the lower half was cut from a slab of walnut. Gears are all central american cocobolo, the green drive gear is cut from a piece of emeraldwood I had laying around. Actuator knob is bloodwood, too. I did some cool celtic knotwork v-carving inside the top of the pipe, as well as on the bottom of the pipe too.

This is a highly complex series of cutting files that create this pipe. I will be spending the next few weeks streamlining and refining the cut files to try to trim off unnecessary and redundant cutting time.

I use the following bits to achieve all of the different cuts to make this pipe:

End Mills: .0313" two flute spiral cutter, .0937" two flute spiral cutter, .250" 4 flute end mill.

V-carve bits: 40 degree 1/8" shank Dremel v-bit from Home Depot, 90 degree 1" v-bit standard router bit.

All of the precision gear cutting and other parts that make up the mechanical iris are cut out of .125" laminates that I make here in my shop. I use the .250" end mill to plane the laminates to my desired thickness first, then I switch to my tiny .0313" end mill to cut out the precision mechanical parts of the iris. I actually "tack weld" the laminate down to the table surface using lots of tiny dots of super glue. I put a few dots under where each part will be, and then I cut them out and the super glue "welds" them to my table surface so I don't have to use tabs to keep the parts in place. Then when the cutting is done, I pry off the excess material and then I use a razor blade to slice the parts off the table surface. It works great, and eliminates the time consuming job of removing tab material from tiny precision parts with delicate edges.

The main pipe body is mostly cut out with the .250" end mill, and I use a smaller .0937" mill to do the tighter spaces. All of the celtic knotwork is v-carved with the 40 degree Dremel v-bit. The edge beveling around the outside of the pipe body is all done with a regular 90 degree 1" v-bit.

Thanks again to Chris Schaie and the other people who contributed to his mechanical iris concept. It is great that people like them will share their work so that other people like me can find neat applications for their ideas.

Top view of the pipe:
http://i713.photobucket.com/albums/w...gatorPipe4.jpg

Mechanical iris closed:
http://i713.photobucket.com/albums/w...gatorPipe1.jpg

Twist knob to open:
http://i713.photobucket.com/albums/w...gatorPipe3.jpg

Cool four-fingered grip:
http://i713.photobucket.com/albums/w...gatorPipe2.jpg

See more below

More pics:

Bottom with v-carving:
http://i713.photobucket.com/albums/w...gatorPipe5.jpg

Fills the hand nicely!
http://i713.photobucket.com/albums/w...gatorPipe6.jpg

A view of the entire pipe as it would rest on your table:
http://i713.photobucket.com/albums/w...gatorPipe7.jpg

Once again, this is just a prototype. I tried a variety of different woods and materials to see how they would cut as such a small scale. When doing precision micro-machinework, different woods can really respond differently. I have had very good luck cutting tiny things out of the denser oily woods like cocobolo and rosewood. Maple also tends to cut clean and sharp.

This prototype has a variety of the different test woods, therefore it features a cobbled up color scheme which would not be present in the finished production models. Finished models will all feature possibly two or three different (but complementary) woods.

Now I just gotta go find someone who smokes a pipe so they can try it out and tell me how it works!

Fantastic work on the details! Love those little gear teeth.. if it were me.. most of that would be done on a laser cutter.

Clearly not for the average tobacco user..

D

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?

http://www.talkshopbot.com/forum/sho...t=making+gears

its a long thread but lots of info...

SG

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..

Google "steampunk" and look at the pics.

Yeah, I agree - that thing is too nice to use...you'd have to be high to smoke out of that thing :D

-B

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...

Quote:

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Originally Posted by gabrielleigh

Now I just gotta go find someone who smokes a pipe so they can try it out and tell me how it works!

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I live in Humboldt County California. I bet I could find a person or two that smoked a pipe :) lol

All kidding aside that is a excellent piece of craftsmanship.

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

Quote:

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Originally Posted by bmcnabb

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?

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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.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by genek

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..

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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.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by genek

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...

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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.

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