Paper Gears

An experimental form of rapid prototyping on the cheap I was playing around with a bit recently. I thought it might be a useful middle ground between off-the-shelf (and therefore limited) solutions like Legos and Fischer-Technique, and from-scratch methods, which require lots of time, lots of expensive equipment, and a great deal of highly specialized knowledge.

I started by designing a number of machine parts in 3d Studio Max, making sure they meshed with each other.
Then I brought the models into Tenkai, a program that allows one to generate unfolded patterns from 3d models that can then be cut out and contstructed. With that, and some tweaking in Illustrator, I had some print-able sheets of proto-gears.

After printing the images onto cardstock, and lots of cutting and assembly, I ended up with fully functional and suprisingly durable gears, both standard and 45o bevel. Still a little labor intensive, but much easier and cheaper than machining, and more acessible. In the future, I plan on developing more components and offering them for download online.