Afternoon all,
Progress is still painfully slow, but after several months of quietly beavering away here is a link to a film of the basic mechanics of the machine actually running with a handle. If you want to know why the pointers are doing such weird things have a read of the blurb that goes with the film.
https://youtu.be/Ke_wspU5748
Having got it going more or less successfully I very quickly realised that it would need a considerable redesign before I could actually finish it, mainly because the output dials would not fit onto the frames as I'd made them, so it was back to the drawing board (literally!) to come up with a design that would work for the internal gubbins as well as the external wizzy pointy bits. So below is what I've come up with - freshly cut and hastily cobbled together for photographic purposes.
The photos show the front and back of the machine to show the differences between the two. Both front and back will carry their own very different displays hence the different shapes.
I ran into a bit of a hitch having cut them though, my drill press is not big enough to allow me to drill the centre holes in the frames as it's only got a 10.5cm throat depth (about standard for most £100 machines I have discovered). Unfortunately my frames are close to 13cm to the centre of each circle, so I've had to splash out on a shiny new drill press with a much deeper capacity. It's always nice to have an excuse for a shiny new toy, and I have wanted one for a while, but I just wish that I'd worked this out sooner!
The size of the frames is very much a product of the size of the gearing that they're going to contain and the dials that will be fitted onto them, so going smaller wasn't really an option, so I guess I was always going to have to get a bigger machine.
Right, I'm off to start cutting a new batch of gears whilst I wait for the postman.
Until next time ladies and gents.