Carousel

Many carnivals, toy stores, and shopping malls are graced with delightful carousels that capture the joy of both children and adults alike. They can be large enough to ride or small enough to be a decoration. Most of these carousels are created with poles that move up and down over a wave-like path that guides the pole up and down as they revolve around the carousel's center. My project goal was to re-create a carousel that instead uses gears and linkages to recreate this vertical and rotational motion.

The way I decided to do this was to use a gear for rotational motion and a sliding linkage for vertical motion. To combine these into one design my initial idea was to have one fixed pole, on which five sliding joints would be placed. This "fixed pole"/"stationary pole" was placed slightly off-center so that as the sliders rotated about it, depending on the position of the slider, the slider length protruding from the main ring would be either longer(pulling the pole downwards) or shorter (pushing it upwards).

To verify that this design will work I used PMKS to model one of the pole and slider pairs as it rotates around the ring. I utilized data from the MATLAB and PMKS simulation to verify the length of the slider and the radius of the sun gear (6" and 9.5" respectively) as I could determine there would be room for the slider bar to fully extend without interfering with the rotation of the pole around the carousel.

To save time, I decided to laser cut most pieces. I began by laser cutting the gear as well as the ring gear. This was one of the most crucial pieces in the carousel as the whole system would fail if the gear and ring gear did not align properly.

I decided to minimize the amount of 3D printed material as much as possible due to its high fail-rate and instead designed joints that could be made with only laser cutting. The joints (shown in the pictures below) feature a wooden bead and dowel rod held between two laser-cut parts. These joints also increase the unity of the design by sticking to primarily wooden parts.

After combining the physical builds with a servo, powered by an Arduino, the desired combination of vertical and rotational motion was achieved in what I believe to be a success. The spur gear is sufficiently mated with the sun gear so that there is little extra room for the teeth to slip. Additionally, the lubricant used allows the carousel to move with very little friction. Overall, the build captures the desired motion and I had so much fun bringing it to life!