One could hope for 90 years of life. In life it is easy to forget the small details to focus on the big picture, the flip side of that coin is also true. Details get in the way of seeing the whole.
Original concept post can be found here: DeathDial – Concept
One could hope for 90 years of life. In life it is easy to forget the small details to focus on the big picture, the flip side of that coin is also true. Details get in the way of seeing the whole. DeathDail is a reminder of both of these ideas. The dial focuses on the constant movement of life towards an end, an end that must be present in all things. The movements of each gear no matter how small represent the details in life, while the centrally mounted bar shows the path a whole life traverses. Taking a full 90 years to move from the start position at zero degrees to the end position at 180 degrees.
In the end the gear ration is approximately 1:950,000,000 from the drive gear to the output shaft.
DeathDail – final form with gear studs and centrally mounted dial.
Notes on the original concept, this is was before I made the decision to expose and focus on the gears. Each individual gear contributes to the overall movement of the dial as a whole.
Ideation on how the gears would be held in place, the “gear ramp”. This changes very late in the fabrication process, more on that later.
calculations for gear studs, the eventual solution to the gear ramp problem.
Final gear train, this give the final ratio of approximately 1:950,000,000. this makes the dial move only 180 degrees over the span of 90 years.
Gear train exploration.
Gear train exploration.
Gear train exploration.
Process of working through the arrangement of the gear train.
Process of working through the arrangement of the gear train.
Completed gear ramp part which was not used in the final production piece do to an issue with the calibration the printer used to produce the part.
I also had issues with printing the mold for the concrete base, the printers I had access to were in disrepair forcing me to figure out a different process. I used a cake pan and a laser cut template to drill holes in the mold.
Bolts were placed through the holes in order to locate the barrel nuts which would act as the anchoring point for the gear studs.
This shows the inside of the cake pan with the barrel nuts fixed in place, the concrete was poured into this to create the base.
Concrete freshly poured into mold.
Cured concrete with bolts acting as plugs just incase the concrete flowed over the barrel nuts.
One half of the gear ramp, the tolerance on the Z-axis of this printer was off by 10% causing the space for the nut inserts to be too small. The wholes for the gear axels were also undersized to the point that the axel would not fit though.
The hole for the axel nut was in-line with the print layers, the pressure of inserting the nut caused the print to fail along the layer lines.
Final assembly of the gear train.
All gears and and central dial mounted.
Each gear stud had to be cut to length and then fine tuned to make sure the gear meshed properly between the previous and next gear.
