Gear/Crank Paper Mechanism
Two Essential Mechanisms as starting point for new projects.
As I’m sure many of you will remember, I first started making paper automata/ paper animation kits as printed booklets. I produced a whole series of paper projects under the umbrella title of Flying Pig Paper Animations. They were well received but in the end were a victim of there own success, I was spending more and more time putting things in envelopes with correspondingly less time available for designing new projects. With the arrival of covid and some other family upheavals I packed up the Flying Pig projects and moved entirely to downloadable projects.
Earlier this year I met a publisher / distributer who is interested in reviving the printed kits. He’ll handle the printing and distribution and I’ll come up with the new designs. Sounds like a plan to me! So to that end I’m working to create an initial set of ten new printed paper projects. There are projects on www.robives.com that lend themselves to being converted into printed kits
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…plus I have a whole host of ideas for new paper projects. It’s all really quite exciting!
Looking through the Essential Mechanisms section of www.robives.com gives me a whole set of ready made starting points onto which I can add paper characters to make a finished project. For example, the Oyster Catcher above is based on the Scotch Yoke Essential Mechanism. I’m working on a couple of other ideas both of which use variants of the Gear/Crank Essential Mechanisms featured in the animation at the top of this post. Both mechanisms are the same but they are housed is different sized boxes with different layouts. Having the character in an automata move at a different speed from that of the input crank handle can add to the feeling of the character being alive. In these mechanisms I’ve used a gear reduction to achieve this effect. The crank handle is connected to a nine tooth pinion wheel
.This meshes with a 23 tooth gear connected to a crank which in turn drives the output arm and on to the character.
Making 3d gears from card is fiddly and time consuming so instead I’ve opted to use flat, double thickness card gears meshing at ninety degrees to each other.
The result is a gear reduction of 9:23 or a little over 1:2½
I’ll be using these projects as starting points for a couple of my upcoming printed kits, and you can too! There will be more details about upcoming kits soon, if you are interested in getting quick sneak peeks it is worth following me on Instagram, I’ve be posting progress pictures there on the ‘Stories’ part of Insta.
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