I’ve come to realize making something from scratch winds up building a bunch of prototypes as you both perfect the plans and figure out how to make the parts.
And in my case, while the plans may be great–my ability to machine parts is… shall we say questionable?
At any rate, I have a second pass at the Earth/Moon orrery.
A few observations about my design.
First, the gears don’t quite have the axle holes dead center. It’s not that I don’t own a set of mill center drills, which are useful for starting a hole at the exact spot you want it at (rather than trying to use a drill bit and getting a hole wherever the damned bit bends to), it’s that I forgot to use them when I made the center holes of the gears.
So I have to remember when cutting a gear to use the following steps, which I document here because someone else may find these useful. (I’d make a video, but I’d need to license the Benny Hill Yakety Sax music.)
1. Measure and cut the blank for the gear from 1/8th or 1/16th thick sheet metal. (I’m using aluminum because it’s cheaper than ruing hundreds of dollars of brass.) The blanks should be slightly bigger than (N+2)/32 inches (for 32P gears, which is the size I’m cutting) in diameter. (I made the mistake once of thinking “radius.” That wasn’t good.) The blank should be drawn around a divot in the center made with a hand punch.
2. Set up an arbor for the gear. Take a piece of aluminum rod close in diameter to the gear we’re cutting, mount and center on the lathe, and face the arbor. This causes the end of the arbor to be flat relative to the cutting surface we’re cutting on.
Note that all of this is taking place on the little Sherline, because one of the steps will completely screw up the center otherwise.
3. Attach the blank to the arbor. Using a center on the tail stock and a dash of superglue, superglue the gear blank to the arbor. Use the tail stock center to help center and push the gear blank on the arbor, and allow five to ten minutes for the glue to set.
4. Cut the gear blank. On the lathe, turn the blank to the desired diameter. For 32P gears, this is the Outer Diameter of the gear, and is (N+2)/32 inches in diameter for a gear with N teeth.
5. Using a mill center drill bit, start a center for the axle. This is the step I kept missing, and that caused my gears to be slightly off center. The end result is a tiny little divot at the exact center of the gear blank, which then can be used to drill a hole without having the drill bit wander too far off center.
6. Drill the center hole the desired diameter. Enough said. In the case of the orrery, I have to remember one of the 52-teeth gears has a center hole of 9mm. (At some point once I’ve perfected the plans, I’ll upload the instructions for making this device.)
7. Re-mount the gear blank on the mill. I assume the mill has been set up for cutting gears, with the appropriate cutter mounted on the cutting arbor, and the rotary table set up at a 90 degree angle. At this point you’ll need to then verify the gear cutter is centered in the gear to be cut.
8. Start cutting gears. What I’ve been doing–to great effect–is to center the gear across the cutter, so turning the Y axis knob in front slides the gear into the cutter. The moment I hear the tell-tale sign of the gear cutter starting to cut the gear, I note the depth on the knob (all my mills and lathes are marked in inches), rotate the X axis to get the gear out of the cutter, and turn the knob into the cutter 0.0625 inches. This is the desired depth of the teeth.
(We get 0.0625 inches from the observation that if the outer diameter of a gear grows by 2/32″ for a 32P gear, this means the inner diameter must shrink by a corresponding 2/32″ as well. This means the diameter difference between the outer and inner diameter differs by 4/32″–and the tooth depth, the delta of the radius–must be half that, or 2/32″. That is, the tooth depth is 2/32″ = 0.0625″. By listening for the cutting, my guess is that I’m cutting the teeth a hair wider and a hair deeper than needed. On the other hand, this works out fairly well, given that the final mechanism I built, pictured above, rotates pretty freely with center holes precisely at the locations my Kythera program predicted.)
Once the gear depth is set, lock the Y axis, and start cutting gears by turning the rotary table the desired amount and sliding the gear blank through the cutter using the X axis.
I don’t have any CNC motors attached to my mill, only to the rotary table–so this gets pretty boring pretty fast.
9. If all goes well, separate the blank from the arbor. The technique I’ve seen which works well is to use a blowtorch and heat up the gear blank until the superglue releases. Try not to do this on cement, because you can cause the imperfections in the cement to pop, throwing small bits of cement at your face.
The different gears that are supposed to be attached to each other, by the way, I simply superglued together. This is probably not a great long-term solution, but in the short term it works very well.
I think with a little better technique I can cut the gears and mount them and have a functioning orrery. But the last gear, the thing that rotates around showing the position of the moon–that leaves a whole lot to be desired.
Originally I had built a 14 tooth gear using 1/8th inch thick aluminum, and then cutting a separate component:
This I then superglued to the 14-pin tooth, and I cut the 6mm end with a 6mm thread, which I then screwed a cap on top that holds the pin that will eventually support the moon.
And this went… poorly.
The stupid part is that in retrospect this should have been cut as a pinion:
And the moon should have been mounted not by screwing the top piece on, but by using a grub screw.
Well, in a few days I’ll go back to cutting parts and seeing if I can’t machine something better. Meanwhile, version 2 of my orrery prototype.
The Hacking Den 