Skillset
STEM Practices, Pedagogy, Digital Fabrication, Craftsmanship, Illustration
About
For hands-on making, creating automata usually is accompanied by cams and cam followers because they are easy to make by hand with low precision. Some of our PD students needed gears to express their project ideas on social change. Because we did not have a laser cutter but did have a printer and desktop CNC, I created gear pieces with the CNC and used spray adhesive to layer them into a function gear. Using wet glue or glue sticks took too long and resulted in gears that could come out uneven and nonfunctional.
I taught others to do this but also created an illustrated version to share with other sites, and to be used later on. There is also support for when learners may simply use a trace feature on a bitmap image and how to address the issue so their gear can cut quickly and cleanly on a desktop CNC.
