Spinning Suns Mechanical Sculpture

Introduction:

This is a mechanical sculpture meant to illustrate the mechanisms involved in getting two things to spin in opposite directions. It's pretty to look at, and educational!

Assembly:

     Things you'll need:

• Super Glue/Plastic glue
• Skateboard bearings
• Rubber bands

You'll need to print everything once, except the pulleyLarge, you'll need three of them.

Assembly can be a little bit tricky as the tolerances are pretty tight. I did this on purpose because I wanted to avoid using glue, but was unable to successfully do that. You may need to sand some holes a teeny bit.

Assembly steps are as follows:

1. Place the bearings in the base (4 bearings)
2. Place the bearing cap inside the TOP REAR bearing (see photos)
3. Place the floating rod between the two bottom bearings (see photos)
4. Put two of the large pulleys on the floating rod.
5. Place rubber bands on the large pulleys you just placed. (I used two per pulley for a total of four rubber bands)
6. Insert the rear sun through the TOP FRONT bearing
7. Insert the front sun through the rear sun's hole, but do not push it all the way through the bearing cap.
8. Place one large pulley on the rear sun's tube, and the small pulley on the front sun's rod (see photos)
9. Connect rubber bands as you see in the photos, where the rubber bands closest to the sculpture are connected as an O and the rubber bands at the rear of the sculpture are connected as an X.
10. Push front sun's rod through the bearing cap.
11. Align everything as best you can, taking care to leave some space between plastic parts so they don't rub together. (Not hugely important, you can still shift things around once the sculpture is completely put together)
12. Give it a test spin, understand though that the pulleys might slip – you just want to make sure things are looking good.
13. Glue the pulleys into place taking care not to glue things you don't intend to together. (Ask me how many times I did that.)
14. Spin away!