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The Skill to Build

For this CornerStone 1 (Northeastern Universities First year engineering class) assignment we wanted mainly to learn how the laser cutter worked, but also to figure out how a nice, simple mechanism would work as well.

We ended up choosing the rack and pinion — a mechanism that translates rotation motion into linear motion or vise versa. To the right is a video of 2 initial variations and the final prototype.

https://youtu.be/KdLog2J7MXU

In this skill builder we also learned some valuable lessons.

1. The material matters — Cardboard itself even when laser cut is extremely fragile and because the inside of it isn’t solid, the teeth of our gear kept getting stuck in the rectangular hole that allowed linear motion of the gear. Cardboard is good for initial prototyping perhaps but for final products the material needs to be durable and robust.
2. Time management/communication — If no one takes the initiative then work doesn't get done, we both learned to communicate and plan meetings on the regular in order to finish the project

Prototyping phase

During the prototyping phase I definitely developed an appreciation for the laser cutter, because (for both of us) we found out quite quickly that using scissors or even an exacto knife made precise cutting very difficult.

We also found during prototyping how important it was for the teeth to properly mesh. So in our Final Prototype we tried to get actual measurements and math for everything a gear required, out work for that is shown below:

After we met up to do all the calculations we went to make the Autocad drawing shown below, then we laser cut and assembled to make the final Version shown at the top of this page.