Research
- Dzhulia Bogdanova
- May 24, 2019
- 3 min read
Updated: May 26, 2019
There are a few things that we still haven't figured out.
How to make the mechanism for the gear wheels in the last E?
What are the possibilities for the transparent materials?
What kind of wooden material can we use for the letters and the pedestal?
Gear mechanism
From my research I learned a few important things:
The teeth of the gears must have the same profile, only then they will transmit rotation. Which makes perfect sense, of course. When we are making the design of the gears we have to be very careful.
The pitch diameter refers to the working diameter of the gear, a.k.a., the diameter of the pitch circle. We have to use the diameter of the pitch circle to calculate how far away two gears should be (the sum of the two pitch diameters divided by 2 is equal to the distance between the two axes).
The Standard pressure angles (the angle between the line defining the radius of the pitch circle to the point where the pitch circle intersects a tooth and the tangent line to that tooth at that point) are 14.5, 20, and 25 degrees. The pressure angle affects how the gears contact each other, and thus how the force is distributed along with the tooth. Two gears must have the same pressure angle to mesh.
In case we need help with the making of the gears we can use Inkscape (a free, open-source vector-based drawing program). The Inkscape starter kit gives you a making guide and three templates.
Sources of information:
how gears work:
Materials
We still have not decided what transparent material we are going to use for some of the letters. We need transparent material for 3 letters. The last E, with the gears, will be with plexiglass or normal glass. But then comes the question - Can we cut glass without ruining it?
Plexiglass can be used for the other two letters as well, but a few teachers already told me that working with plexiglass is very difficult (and also expensive). Margit suggested to me that we use Paper-mâché. I decided to research the topic.
My research did not help me a lot. I found a step-by-step description of how the paper-mache procedure works. In order to find out whether making the front side of the letter with paper-mache will work, I will have to test it. So this would be my next step - testing the paper-mache technique.
sources of information:
Another option for the transparent material is a thin plastic sheet. It can be colored or white. I think it will be easy to work with this material. But again with this material it has to be tested in order to be sure that it will work well and will look nice.
examples of material:
Another option is fabric. Especially for the S ( we already have this idea in mind) but it can be used for the first E as well.
Wood
Choosing wooden material will be difficult. We have to think about many things - the material should be of good quality (in case of bad weather), the prize of the wood and the weight of the wood.
I talked to my brother ( he is a carpenter) and I asked him for a piece of advice on what wood we should use to build the pedestal. He told me that it does not matter what wood material we will use because 3 days are not that much time and a regular wooden material will be fine.
My brother also confirmed what we already knew - that it will be very expensive. He said that the wood material, in general, is expensive and having to build a pedestal almost 3 meters long is going to be very expensive. He told me that my idea of separating the pedestal in thirds is good and also that we have to make sure that our measurements are precise and correct.
I think that the prize of the material will be the main thing that will help us decide what material we will use.
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