I don’t think it would come as a surprise to anyone that I have enough of an interest in 3D printing that I had to find some excuse to try it. That excuse finally came when, as part of a larger project, I needed to create a gear box. Besides the obvious (gears, duh) I wanted a pulley system to turn a potentiometer. For fear of jinxing my project I don’t want to get into to much detail, yet. In the meantime, here is the first part of how I came up with the gear box.
I used free iPad software from AutoDesk called 123D Design. It was free/cheap and worked pretty well. The main limitations were that I ran up against some memory limitations: I have an older iPad 2 that doesn’t have tons of memory. So I made the mistake of dropping in a gear from their gallery and that caused the app to dump my project completely. Luckily I had been saving stuff up to the cloud (my project is located here) and managed to download a pre-gear back up and only lost about an hour of work.
Total time to design this out was about six to seven hours. I might have trimmed that in half if I had avoided the aforementioned crash and also some of the backtracking that comes from looking at different versions to come up with what works.
The next post on this should be how the print actually worked out in the end. Stay tuned.
