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Have you ever messed around with a spirograph set, and wished it was way bigger? Yeah, me too. With a few discarded bike parts and scrap pegboard, it can be.
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Signing UpStep 1Materials and Methods
For this project you'll need the following:
Bike chain - should be reasonably straight, but pretty much any crappy, rusty, bent chain will work. You can combine various chains to make one of any size desired. I suggest cleaning off the grease first.
Chainring - any bike gear will work, but chainrings are bigger and have convenient bolt holes to put your pen in. If you use a cog from the rear gears of a bike, you'll need to affix some cardboard or something to make pen holes.
Pegboard - 1/4 inch pegboard with 1inch hole spacing seems to work perfectly. A bike chain is about 1/4inch thick, so this size works well. You can also use plywood, plexi, or probably even cardboard. Those things don't have conveniently pre-drilled holes, however.
Wire - thin, flexible steel wire works well. Nothing too thick and avoid insulation. You'll probably need at least 5 feet. You could use some sort of glue to put the chain on as an alternative. Hot glue would probably work real nice.
Jigsaw and drill to start the cut.
Bike chain - should be reasonably straight, but pretty much any crappy, rusty, bent chain will work. You can combine various chains to make one of any size desired. I suggest cleaning off the grease first.
Chainring - any bike gear will work, but chainrings are bigger and have convenient bolt holes to put your pen in. If you use a cog from the rear gears of a bike, you'll need to affix some cardboard or something to make pen holes.
Pegboard - 1/4 inch pegboard with 1inch hole spacing seems to work perfectly. A bike chain is about 1/4inch thick, so this size works well. You can also use plywood, plexi, or probably even cardboard. Those things don't have conveniently pre-drilled holes, however.
Wire - thin, flexible steel wire works well. Nothing too thick and avoid insulation. You'll probably need at least 5 feet. You could use some sort of glue to put the chain on as an alternative. Hot glue would probably work real nice.
Jigsaw and drill to start the cut.
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lol that was my first thought when I saw this. "Holy crap! I bet I can scale that up to fit my router!" I dont know if you could do it with a chain ring though or a bike chain. The difference in thickness would be a problem. In InkScape you can generate gears that you could print and cut with a jigsaw. That would cover the whirly part but im not sure how to make the track it rides around in. A router that can use bushings may be a good idea or some bearings that will fit on a 1/4 shaft so that your bit isnt interacting with the gear at all.
On second thought, I think that woodcraft.com has a pantograph for plunge routers. That would be the easiest, then you could use a small spirograph and scale it up to the size you want.
A problem with the bike-part project is that the chain is a bit flexible (unless you affix to pegboard @ every link) and so there is a bit of distortion in parts of the resulting graph.
www.ilovethe80s.com/toys_toys_spirograph.htm