Build-a-Bird: Day #6—2/17/11

We met outside of class to print our last rectangle iteration and to finally assemble our gearbird.

We had to repeat the cut line on the laser printer five times for this final iteration, more than we had ever needed to do before, but after the printing process was complete, all of our pieces were finally ready to be assembled!

We used the loose fit piano wire drill bit to drill holes in our little (red) rotators, small rectangles, gears, and Delrin ‘wing’ rods.  Unfortunately, the first time we drilled holes in all of these pieces we accidentally used the press fit piano wire drill bit—a discovery we made when we unsuccessfully tried to jam the piano wire through the too-small holes.  This problem was an easy fix though, all we had to do was re-drill in the same spots with the slightly larger, loose fit piano wire drill bit.

Loose fit piano wire drill bit!

Assembly from this point on was pretty straightforward.  We used piano wire to connect the pieces that we had just drilled (easier said than done—I ended up with a miniature puncture wound on my thumb when I got a little bit overzealous with the piano wire).

We needed something to hold the rods press-fit to our gears in place, and lock washers, one on either side of each of our big rectangles were just the ticket.  Our Delrin rods needed a little bit of trimming (the wings had been brushing the table at the bottom of their rotation), and voilá! Our bird was complete!

All that was left was the crank.  We found a spare piece of circular Delrin in the scrap bin, drilled two holes in it, and attached it to one of the rotating Delrin rods.  Unfortunately, the holes we had drilled were slightly too big, making them just larger than the press fit size that they needed to be.  That tiny difference meant we could only turn the crank one direction, because otherwise the crank just rotated around the rotator.  We knew that we would need to search for another piece of scrap Delrin to fix the crank later, but in the meantime, we were very, very excited to finally have our flapping gearbird!

Front view

  

Side view

Back view

I came just before class started on Friday to give our bird a little personality.  Two pompoms, a pipe cleaner, and some googly eyes did the trick, and we finally had our adorable avian creation.

How can you resist those eyes?

Finished Gearbird!