Wicked Makers

The Scissor Mech Works!

Added 2024-06-07 13:30:41 +0000 UTC

After a few days of cutting, welding, drilling, and experimenting, we got it all working!!

As you can probably guess, the character (or boxing glove? or whatever lol) will get attached to the end and it springs out super fast when it's turned on!

One of the tricky parts is that you can see the bottom of the first piece has to slide up and down to compensate for the vertical positioning as it extends. Some people use curtain track for this but we couldn't find any so we used some aluminum extrution and a little sliding thing we had from a previous camera slider project and its SUPER SMOOTH. Works perfectly. 😀

On the joints themselves, we used a "shoulder bolt" (which is a long bolt with a non-threaded part for smooth rotation) and then put these oil-infused bronze bushings so it could rotate cleanly inside the hole. Between that and everything being measured properly, there is no slop at all and it opens and closes like perfectly. HUGE WIN, SO HAPPY!

The big next steps are adding cylinders to actually push it open and closed, and to of course build the character.

We're always trying to learn from our lessons of previous projects and this time we're exploring a brand new material to make the character extremely lightweight. More on that later!

~J&J