Post date: Jan 25, 2019 6:7:47 AM
We are pleased to announce that as of January 23rd, 2019 we have put together two separate prototypes to assess their feasibility.
The first prototype is of our initial concept, which we call the lock-plane. You can see the results of this prototype here. While this design is favorable because it combines both rotary DoFs into a single apparatus, its performance did not live up to our expectations because the rapid positioning nuts up top have a tendency to not sit flush on top of the acrylic plates in some orientations.
Our second prototype, which we call the double rotisserie, has both axes of rotation passing (nearly) through the center of mass of the test mass. This made for a naturally balanced system that was fairly easy to rotate with minimal effort. We are extremely pleased with these results and are planning on moving forward with this concept. You can see the results of this prototype here.