De-emphasizing the Corner

Our sixth project was called De-emphasizing the Corner, and it required us to build a diagonal half cube and adorn the two sides that would show and the right triangle top with a layered design intended to draw attention from the corner created by all 3 sides meeting.

Yet again, I struggled to find or create a good design in my mind and was grasping at straws for designs. I wish I hadn't used the Companion Cube earlier in the course, because it would have been perfect for this. I had eventually settled for a strange box from the video game The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, but it proved to be too problematic getting a good screenshot from which to work.

I then for some reason thought of clockwork. All the interlocking gears working together flawlessly even on multiple layers. It was perfect, and I was determined to make it so that the gears would move with each other, So I set out finding some pictures to use on the internet, and I found a picture with a few good gears. However, I edited them and created some more variety as well, by twisting the arms of some of them. I set them up in PhotoShop on two separate layers so that I could print the gray separately from the black. I tried to set them up as mechanically sound as I could manage and also made a triangular top in this same fashion. From just looking at the gears, I could tell that they would all move if I turned just one crank that would be on the small black gear in the bottom right of the image. That gear and the grey one behind it would be the only gears connected to each other by glue.

Once I had it all mapped and printed out, I began tracing the gears onto a sheet of foam board that was left over from the "Window to the Soul" project. I also built the main half cube in the same way as I did in that project.

With all of the gears traced, I began carefully cutting them out. To be honest, it wasn't all that difficult. I simply stabbed downward into the lines and let the angle of the blade do the cutting for me. The only problem I had with it was that it took a very long time as I had to cut out 34 gears in total of varying sizes and shapes. The worst part was that I had to sit in the floor for the whole time because the foam board was too large to fit on my desk (even if it was cleaned off.), so I had to get up and stretch ever once in a while. My legs were killing me afterward... from sitting!

 I finally got all of one side cut out and began putting them together to test out how well they worked. They looked fantastic, but some of the small gears wouldn't cooperate with the large ones, and kept getting snagged on each other, so unfortunately I had to scrap the idea of making them all move and settle for the knowledge that it would have worked if it weren't for those meddling small gears. However, I suspected that there was a possibility of such a thing happening, so I carried on with the design, because I still think it looked cool. I finished cutting out the rest of the gears and retired for the night.

The next morning I began setting them up on the base with straight pins as their axles to keep them in place. I messed around with them still trying to make them work at this point, but there was nothing short of making new gears that could be done. 

I simply glued them in place as it shows them in the PhotoShop mockup and made adjustments so that they would grip the gears from the other sides better. It took me about 2 days total of working; half a day to design it, a full day of cutting out gears (seriously, it took forever) and actually only about a couple hours to glue the gears down into the final product. I must say, I'm pretty proud of it.