Project 2 Part 6: Project Statement

Project Statement: 

    The aim of Project 2 was to create a motorized automata - an apparatus that can translate rotational movement from a motor into a small scene that tells a story. My concept from the beginning was a dock scene with a fisherman pulling up a crab pot from the side of the dock, and throughout the project the crab pot became an assortment of garbage to produce an environmentalist message about cleaning up the bay. 

    With this project, I wanted to challenge myself by designing a custom mechanism that would create the effect of an object on a rope being pulled up by a person and then gravity pulling it back down. This entailed making cams with arms that could push down the rope holder with enough force to lift the weight on the other end. To facilitate the up and down movement of the rope while minimizing lateral movement and friction, I designed a custom rope holder apparatus. The final key parts of the mechanism were the gears, which I made in a 6:1 ratio to slow the motor speed down, and then laser cut on the Co2 laser. For the visuals, I made planks out of balsa wood and the fisherman figure out of aluminum wire and felt.

    I had to scale down the scope of the project a few times, abandoning the crab pot idea, having the fisherman's arms move with the rope, and the 3D printed life-size crab that was going to be climbing up the dock behind the figure, but that's part of the process. A few days before the due date, I was having a serious problem because I couldn't get the arms of the cams to push down on the rope holder with enough force without losing their connection to the shaft. I almost abandoned my custom mechanism and switched to a simpler cam-based movement. In the end, I decided I'd rather give my custom design everything I had and try all I could think of to get it working. This involved switching the rope for one with less friction, iterating on the wooden part of the rope holder, and trying many combinations of item assortment to get the right weights, among other changes. In the end, the fact that the mechanism had to push down and apply pressure was slowly degrading the integrity of all the pieces every time I turned the motor on. The gears started to wobble, so I had to hold the gears a bit as the machine ran so nothing would get knocked out of place. In the end, I'm very glad I stayed committed to my original idea and got it (mostly) working. It was a real test of whether or not I could take something I had ideated and create it in the real world, and I'm satisfied with the final result. 











 

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