Early Trinkets
I’ve always enjoyed making things and working with my hands. This is fortunate because it turns out that developing a deep intuition for materials and fabrication processes is indispensable to good mechanical design (which is what I do professionally). The following are some fun projects from when I was a teenager.
Stirling Engines
These are two Stirling engines I built on my own, (not as part of any class). Stirling engines transform heat energy to mechanical energy by compressing a gas when it is cold (at lower pressure), and allowing the gas to expand when it is hot (at higher pressure).
The first engine didn’t work at all, even with a blowtorch on the hot cylinder and an ice cube pressed against the cold one. The second engine fared much better, running briskly when placed on a cup of hot water. Note the use of non traditional materials (at least for engines) such as acrylic and styrofoam.
Casse Tette
This is a puzzle-sculpture I carved out of plastic sections of tube. The pieces fit together in more than one way, but once I got them to fit together as shown I never had the courage to take them apart again. The tube cross sections are a quarter inch square, and the entire puzzle is about three inches cubed. It can be tossed in the air without falling apart.
Tourbillion
This is a tourbillion I made when I was 14, before I knew about CAD and before the internet was useful. It’s clunky and crude but it (still) runs nicely. Most of the parts come from an old Westclox Big-Ben alarm clock movement.
Perpetual Calendar A
This is a perpetual calendar mechanism I designed and made when I was in high school. The big idea was to reduce the number of parts by making all the wheels concentric. Most of the parts (including all the gears) were hand filed out of an old restaurant door handle.
Perpetual Calendar B
This is an improvement on the previous design, with fewer levers and using springs (rather than mass and gravity) to keep things in position. It worked relatively well- even upside down!
Perpetual Calendar C
For some reason I became fixated on perpetual calendars. Here is one that I designed and attempted to fabricate onto an old Doxa watch. These watches are especially big, making them ideal platforms for projects like this. This particular mechanism was never functional- but it taught me a lot and gave me resolve to one day make a functional perpetual calendar watch.