Gear Coasters

My friend Rick is a talented craftsman and tinkerer. Among other things, he’s made a career out of making artificial rocks. I know! Who woulda’ thunk you could have a career making fake rocks! If you’ve been to the New Orleans Zoo you’ve seen his work. A few months ago we started an inventors club. Really it’s just some time set aside each week for experimenting and tinkering. Lately I’ve been working on Rick to get him excited about CNC routers. A CNC router is a router that is controlled by a computer. You can use it to very accurately cut out 2D and 3D shapes that are drawn on a computer. Think of it as a wood cutting robot.

I built my own homemade CNC router a few years ago and I’ve just barely scratched the surface of its capabilities. I knew Rick would have some interesting ideas of things to make with it. He was a little skeptical at first but once he got on board the ideas just started flowing. One of the first things he wanted to make was a homemade spirograph. Spirograph? OK, why not? Whatever gets him hooked. He bought a computer program that generates drawings of gears of any size. We figured we could use it make a set of interlocking gears to make the spirograph.

First we drew a test gear to see if we could get from the drawing to a cut out gear. First we drew a test gear to see if we could get from the drawing to a cut out gear.  I exported the gear drawing into Rhino 3D and set up the instructions to tell the CNC machine how to cut it out. We cut a sample first in cardboard. After a few false starts we had the program worked out.

I've included the g-code if you want to cut your own gears out.  It's formatted for Mach 3.

I brought it into the house and had it sitting on my desk to look at and think about what to do next.

Molly stuck it under a glass.

Ah-ha! Gear coasters!