I have been off the site for quite a while for various reasons and I am sorry. I have popped in from time to time and continue to be amazed at the variety and talent of the artists posting photos of their projects.
I first started this Jungle Book carousel back in September last year – it is for my grandson when he is old enough to have it. Being a project made from scratch there were a lot of design and fabrication issues to figure out and not being an engineer, of course I overlooked some things and made parts that just didn’t work. My goal was to create a working carousel using gears and eccentrics to lift the animals as the base rotated. I quickly learned that I have no skill for creating gears much less the tiny sizes that I needed to put into this project, so I defaulted to the “wiggle board” concept. That being a copper disc formed to create four rises to lift the animal’s equal distance from each other and also oriented to the center to minimize resistance as the poles that lifted the animals passed over them. It took several iterations to get right. Then I needed some way to reduce the drag of the rises on the shafts and found that I had the right number of perfect sized rollers from an old printer that I could use. I also had to make yokes to hold them to the shaft as you can see in the picture. I used a tape head as the main bearing from an old VCR. It was the perfect option as it is both large and rotates extremely smoothly. It gave me a good base to attach the carousel too so it would not wobble as it turned. I cut the picture trims out of walnut veneer using a laser engraver. The central column that I glued the pictures to is made from copper circuit board material. It is soft and easy to cut and solders like a dream. Getting the frustrum right was a significant challenge. I put a gear reducing motor into the base for setting the proper speed along with other drive gears to turn the base and hid the batteries there as well. I also put in an electronic music box that plays the theme from Jungle Book, “The Bear Necessities”. I mentioned that this is for my grandson when he is older… He is four and found it unbeknownst to me and accidentally stripped the gears after it was completed and glued together. I was devastated after all that work, but the silver lining was that I used E6000 rubber cement to put it together and with some careful and patient prying, I got it apart and repaired like it never happened.
All the shaping, drilling and routing I did with my Dremel suite of tools, which includes my original Model 270 Moto tool which is over 40 years old for routing out the base. I also used my new Model 3100 rotary tool to sand and smooth parts and my 4300 variable speed tool in the drill press for drilling holes. You cannot have enough good tools! Though it took me 8 months to complete the whole thing, I was working on several other projects at the same time and having cataract surgery. It is amazing how much better I can now see.
