![]() ![]() I think that the mounting system for the gears could be improved however as it desperately needs a spacer between the gear and the plate to stop the gear from scratching up the acrylic. I really like the overall aesthetic and the gears I created meshed well and spun smoothly. To mount the gears, I found some small machine screws and then vectored out holes in the base plate to hold them down.Īll in all, I think my name tag turned out well. The final portion was the base plate I debated between using wood for the back as well versus something else, but eventually settled on acrylic because I liked the contrast it created with the burnt wood as well as the added benefit that its smooth surface allowed the gears to spin more smoothly. ![]() In the end, I opted to raster the text which I think looked cleaner than my original plan and allowed me to use a better font. Mangled text from vectoring too small of a font into the gears.įor the text on the gears, my original plan was to vector it out using a stencil font, but after attempting to laser out a few of the gears I realized that the scale of the text was too small, causing the laser to turn most of the gears into charcoal bits and burning away the finer detail of the lettering. I initially struggled with finding a way to align concentric circles within the gears for mounting to the tag base plate, but one of the FABLAB staff members showed me how to use Inkscape’s built in alignment tool which proved to extremely useful throughout the project. Luckily for me, Inkscape has a built-int extension for generating simple toothed gears, which quickly expedited the design process for the mechanical portion. I then decided that gears might be easier, so I began experimenting with different numbers of gears and different layouts until I found one that I thought looked nice at the scale of a name tag (in my case, 4 inches by 3 inches). I initially experimented with levers and wheels, but quickly got frustrated with finding ways to attach the various pieces together securely. For my name tag I knew from the start that I wanted to incorporate a kinetic and interactive aspect into the design, as I think one of the most useful applications of things like laser cutting is the ability to create precise small pieces, and also that it highlights my career choices as a engineering major.
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