Our project idea was inspired by a lot of things. We wanted to create something fun, with apparent gears, inspired by infinite motion and something maybe related with food.
That is why our first idea was to make a bubble gum machine inspired by a video of an infinite machine from Pinterest, whit bubble gum instead of marbles. However, this type of machine can not work in real life. We needed to make some changes in the design and the working of the machine.
We needed to add power to the machine, to find a solution to make the marbles fall, change the design of the Wheel, the path of the rails and the way it is standing. But why ?
First of all the machine can not move without power because of physic law. Still due to physic, the marbles can not fall on their own. Moreover, we decided it was easier for us to change the design of the wheel because we face many difficulties trying recreating the same design as shown in the video, so we went for a simpler design and to make it stand we choose to get rid of the middle hole and add basis to make it stand like a Ferris wheel. This is why we changed the path of the rails too.
We face many other problems. For example, we add to find a way to stabilize the marble during the rotation of the wheel. That is why, we have two disk with hole and one smaller one. the smaller one is going to create a gap between the two big ones. We also had to include support to our rails. We tried many different techniques and created support in plexiglass.
We, also, tried to create weird shaped gears by following this tutorial :
This took a lot of tries before giving up and going back to normal shaped gears.
Plus, we had a problem with our motor too, we weren't able to power it properly at the beginning.
Nonetheless, we faced all these problems and found our way to make our project for the semester, mostly thanks to the advice of our professor and our determination.
In the end, we have two gears, powered by a battery. The bigger one is fixed to an axis and create a rotation. The marbles are spinning in the holes and are pushed by a stick to fall on the rails and land on another hole of the wheel at the bottom. The structure is fixed on a rectangular basis like the stick and all the support.
To see the pictures and the progress of our project here is the link of our powerpoint :