Mechanical Design

Computer Aided Design

Give a summary of your CAD (escapement wheel and pendulum) and what motivated your design. Mention which parts of the design are fixed, and which one were free for design. Mention the trade-offs you made to make sure your pendulum design could be manufactured and has it Center of Gravity below its rotation point (well-balanced)

My pendulum is in the shape of a Hello Kitty Penguin character named Badtz-Maru. I was originally aiming for Tweety Bird as the provided acrylic board was yellow, but many areas were too thin and too risky to manufacture. Thus, I decided to stick to a character with more width and "rectangular" dimensions. The design I adopted is asymmetrical, and much of the pendulum tracing was done by the "spline" tool, or free design. Though the result came out well, the various curvatures and shapes creating the penguin outline came to be a challenge in the process of completing this project. To elaborate on the aforementioned obstacle, transferring the AutoCAD model to Working Model 2D served as a challenge, as I had to retrace the free-design parts of the model in order for WM2 to successfully pick up and show those lines. Additionally, filling in the WM2 outline with polygons was a bit time-consuming, as I had to be meticulous with the tracing in order to create an accurate reflection or representation of my original pendulum. 

As mentioned previously, the Badtz-Maru design was asymmetrical, so I decided to combat that by placing the bolts in a more flat pattern, leaned more towards the side with less acrylic surface area. By doing so, I hoped to create a more balanced pendulum, where the Center of Gravity would be closer to the initial middle line (the very center vertical).