Watch 1:1 LEGO technic gears go round and round

When you don’t have anything to do and want to kill time, you probably just search for random videos on Reels or YouTube that caters to your interest and curiosity. Lego build videos are some of the most popular ones out there. If you’re like me who’s more interested in watching people create Lego structures than actually building one myself, then these videos are catnip for you. It’s pretty interesting to see how they are able to create these masterpieces and also film them for the enjoyment of other people.

Designer: Brick Experiment Channel

The Brick Experiment Channel is a YouTube channel that is more on the experimental side (well, it’s in their name after all) and their latest video proves that. They wanted to try for the longest chain of LEGO technic gears but the catch is they have to retain the same gear ratio of 1:1 from the first gear to the last one. This means that from beginning to end, the gears have to rotate at the same speed. Spoiler alert: They were able to add up to reach a gear count of 111. Seeing them reach that number is pretty impressive especially if you watch from beginning to end.

The video is able to show the entire process from when they started with just a few gears until they reached their limit. The gears are in gray while “platform” is red so you get a very minimalist feel unlike with most lego builds where you get a cacophony of colors and shapes most of the time. Towards the end when they completed the 111 gears, they were even able to change direction and do 3 full rotations of backlash. If you have the same tools as they do then you can probably do some experimenting on your own.

There’s something infinitely satisfying about seeing all the gears going around as they keep adding to the build, similar to what we feel when watching those Rube Goldberg machine chain-reaction type of videos. This is actually an older video so you can explore some more of their newer experiments involving gears and LEGOs on their YouTube channel.

The post Watch 1:1 LEGO technic gears go round and round first appeared on Yanko Design.

This ‘Oddly Satisfying Clock’ has a steampunk gear mechanism that’s a bunch of fun to look at!

Designed and built by Redditor by the name of ‘ragusa12’, the Oddly Satisfying Clock is exactly that… oddly, and extremely satisfying! Inspired by a digital clock with a similar design, Ragusa12 decided to take that digital concept and turn it into a mechanical little timepiece. The rather aptly named Oddly Satisfying clock comes with a 3D-printed design, and is powered by stepper motors running on an Arduino processor. The contraption currently only displays the hours and minutes (because the seconds pass by too fast for the gears and components to actually keep up), and Ragusa12 says the clock’s still a work in progress because the stepper motors make about as much noise as “pushing a full glass of water over a table.”

The way the Oddly Satisfying Clock works is pretty simple, at least in principle. Think of how the odometer on your cars used to work, with printed numeric discs that rotated to show how many miles your car traveled. The Oddly Satisfying Clock simply switches those discs out for vertical columns with numbers on them, that travel up and down to reveal the time. Using a rack and pinion gear system, a set of motors inside the clock’s main body control the movement of the vertical columns, and lights inside the clock illuminate the numbers to tell you what time it is. What’s perhaps the most oddly satisfying bit is watching the clock go from the end of an hour to the next hour, with the minute columns sliding from 59 all the way down to 00! In fact, you can even see how an early iteration of the clock looked when it struck midnight from 23:59 in the GIF below!

If you want to build your own Oddly Satisfying Clock, Ragusa12 has made the 3D files and the underlying Arduino packages available to download for free.

Designer: Ragusa12 (Reddit)

Gear Shaped Planters for Mechanical Plant Lovers

Imagined by Ukrainian designer Anastasia Ivanyuk and available from Italian furniture and lighting company Slide, these Gear Pots are planters that look like mechanical spur gears. The large polyethylene (the most commonly used plastic) pots weigh around 13-pounds, measure approximately 22″ x 22″ x 17″, and make the perfect planters for adding a little greenery to your garage or steampunk factory.

Plant Pots are available in twelve different colors to ensure there’s one that will match the rest of your decor, and are 100% recyclable. Although why you’d ever want to recycle one is beyond me because they cost $647 apiece. I assumed when I first saw the price it was for a ten-pack (and even that seemed steep), but no, that’s for a single plastic pot. Clearly, I’m in the wrong business.

So that first image of the two planters with their gears meshed – there’s $1,294 worth of pots in that photo. For reference, that is entirely too much to pay for any pot or gear that can’t save the universe, and even if it could, I’d still question what the universe has done for me lately before reluctantly entering my credit card info.

[via TheGreenHead]

Did you know you could make complex rotating gears with just magnets?! Watch to see how they work!





You see gears in action and they’re pretty easy to fathom. Metal wheels with interlocking teeth – rotate one wheel and the other wheel rotates in the opposite direction. Change the size of one wheel and it affects the speed at which the other wheel rotates. That’s basically how any simple gearbox on an automobile/bicycle works, translating rotations from a motor or your feet into rotating wheels. What happens when you replace the teeth with magnets? The video above wonderfully explains how gears can work without the mechanical action of interlocking teeth… in fact, they can work without even touching each other! These magnetic gears are pretty interesting and whimsical to look at!

DIY Magnetic Gears Video

YouTuber Magnetic Games shows how these gears work by putting them together from scratch. With 3 3D-printed wheels, the apparatus comes to life. One wheel holds 32 magnets (16 on each side), while the other houses 8 magnets (4 on each side). A third stationary wheel comes with bolts attached in each hole (helping the magnetic attraction pass from one wheel to another), and the apparatus is set up with the wheels on a common axle.

DIY Magnetic Gears Video

Rotating one wheel causes the other to turn in the opposite direction. The wheel with more magnets rotates at a slower pace, while the wheel with less magnets rotates with a higher speed (sort of like a larger gear and smaller gear). Obviously, the magnetic resistance isn’t comparable to the physical resistance of metal gears (you couldn’t really use these in a car or bicycle), but it DOES highlight a unique relationship between gears and magnets – something I knew nothing of until now! Plus, think about it this way, less physical contact = less wear-and-tear…

DIY Magnetic Gears Video

DIY Magnetic Gears Video

Via TheAwesomer

Absolutely genius sawtooth detail gives this simple coffee table height-adjustability!

Perhaps one of the most simple and smart details I’ve ever seen on furniture, Bjarke Ballisager’s Together and Apart Table uses a sawtooth cutout pattern to turn the unassuming wooden block into a table that can adjust its height on the fly! “The primary unit consists of two wedges that interlock at a saw-toothed surface, allowing them to fit together at any of many different levels”, says Ballisager, a New York-based designer and architect.

The two wedges, made out of solid white oak, can be interlocked in a variety of ways, allowing the product to function as a stool, laptop stand, or even a bedside table, thanks to its ability to match the height you need. The sawtooth design detail cleverly borrows from mechanisms like the rack and pinion, often seen in elevators, or even in the car’s steering system. What Together and Apart does is simplify them in a way that allows you to easily appreciate the mechanism’s workings while also marveling at how robust the locking is! Besides, given the sawtooth shape’s angular detail, it works in both landscape as well as portrait, allowing you to have a table that spans a variety of heights… just using two cleverly designed blocks of wood!

Designer: Bjarke Ballisager

This Gear Lamp Makes Your Room Look Like a Steampunk Factory

If you’re into the steampunk aesthetic, you know that it’s loaded with gears – lots and lots of gears. And if you like gears, you’ll love this wall lamp. The lamp uses a reflector light bulb and a precision-cut sheet of gloss black plexiglas to cast shadows onto the wall.

The gigantic gear shadows will make it seem like you’re standing inside of a factory from Modern Times or Metropolis, as your oppressive overlords make you slave away to build their widgets. The only thing better would be if the gears actually moved.

The shadow gear lamp is made by ZK Home Design, who creates all kinds of sweet shadowcaster lamps. They come in a 30cm x 20 cm (~11.8″ x 7.9″) and 78cm (30.7″ x 18.9″) x 48cm sizes, priced roughly about $85 or $150 respectively.

This Machine Will Probably Never Finish a Full Rotation

When it comes to telling time with an analog clock, the idea of gear reduction is a very critical piece of the puzzle. Basically, a set of multiple gears work in concert to gradually rotate at slower speeds. So a single motor can drive the seconds, minutes, and hour hands on a dial.

But rather than just reducing the speed of a gear a couple of times, engineer Daniel de Bruin decided to make what he says is the “biggest reduction gear in the universe.” Well, it may not be the largest in dimension, but it’s definitely the most complicated, with 100 gears, each gradually reducing the speed from the gear before it.

Each successive gear turns at exactly 1/10th of the speed of its predecessor. The result is a setup that would take literally eons before it would rotate its final gear.

According to the guys at Gizmodo, you’d have to turn the first gear

10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,
000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,
000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000

times to move the last gear to move just one position. Man, that’s a whole lot of zeros, and I definitely can’t count that high.

The machine’s creator explains the rationale behind his build: “Today at 14:52 I will be exactly 1 billion seconds old. To celebrate I build this machine that visualizes the number googol. That’s a 1 with a hundred zeros. A number that’s bigger than the atoms in the known universe. This machine has a gear reduction of 1 to 10 a hundred times. In order to get the last gear to turn once you’ll need to spin the first one a googol amount around. Or better said you’ll need more energy than the entire universe has to do that.”

If you’ve got a full hour to kill you can watch the contraption get through the first few of layers of gears…

[via Gizmodo]

I survived the new Escape mode in ‘Gears 5’

I haven't played a Gears of War game since the original came out in 2006. It's no surprise, then, that I would be hesitant to grab an Xbox One controller and play the latest instalment of Microsoft's legendary franchise, Gears 5. But I did it, partic...