Making Things Move - 9780071741675

A unique guide to practical mechanical design principles and their applications

In Making Things Move, you’ll learn how to build moving mechanisms through non-technical explanations, examples, and do-it-yourself projects--from art installations to toys to labor-saving devices. The projects include a drawing machine, a mini wind turbine, a mobile robot, and more, but the applications of the examples are limited only by your imagination. A breadth of topics is covered ranging from how to attach couplers and shafts to a motor, to converting between rotary and linear motion.

Each chapter features photographs, drawings, cross sections, and 3D models of the components and systems involved. Emphasis is placed on using off-the-shelf components whenever possible, and most projects also use readily available metals, plastics, wood, and cardboard, as well as accessible fabrication techniques such as laser cutting. Small projects in each chapter are designed to engage you in applying the material in the chapter at hand. Later in the book, more involved projects incorporate material from several chapters.

Making Things Move:

• Focuses on practical applications and results, not abstract engineering theories
• Contains more than a dozen topic-focused projects and four large-scale projects incorporating lessons from the whole book
• Features shopping lists and guides to off-the-shelf components for the projects
• Incorporates discussions of new fabrication techniques such as laser cutting and 3D printing, and how you can gain access
• Includes online component for continuing education with author’s website

Hands-on coverage of moving mechanisms
Introduction to Mechanisms and Machines; Materials and Where to Find Them; Screwed or Glued? On Fastening and Joining Parts; Forces, Friction and Torque (Oh My); Mechanical and Electrical Power, Work, and Energy; Eeny, Meeny, Miny, Motor? - Creating and Controlling Motion; The Guts: Bearings, Bushings. Couplers, and Gears; Rotary vs. Linear Motion; Automatons and Mechanical Toys; Making Things and Getting Them Made; Projects