Ascension
I recreated a kinetic sculpture called “Ascension” by Bob Potts. I initially started looking for industrial Machines but found them to be somewhat lackluster. I then looked to some kinetic sculptures to find some pieces with more interesting movement and interconnected parts. While it was hard to find a sculpture that fit these criteria I eventually found Bob Potts. I was interested in “Ascension” because of the smooth movements that were being derived from its complex constraints.
Process
Gear :The First thing I went about creating was the “worm and wheel” gear. I stared from a cylinder mod 2 in a group node to select every other face and extruded that group. I found the gear ratio for the worm and wheel was 1 to the number of teeth on the wheel. So my wheel was rotating $F*2 and the wheel had 40 teeth the worm rotated 2*40 = $F*80.
Constraints : I then went about creating the 2 joints. (yellow and red)
For the yellow joint I just modified the vex code given to us to suit the axis that I needed.
The complication came from the red joint. While the yellow joint was along one axis the red Joint was along 2. However the top most pivot point was constrained to only rotate on one axis while the bottom pivot could rotate on 2. This complicated things severely and I had to come up with another solution. I decided to do a normal 2 point constraint along one axis and have that drive the rotation of the top pivot. I then used an add node to stretch the gap between that and the bottom pivot point. This results in a stretching rod instead of a static one son I took some creative liberties and made it into a piston instead.
