Ride in the Wind

A long time ago, somewhere around 500 years, some guy by the name of Leonardo was inventing all sorts of unheard of (at that time) things. In his illustrations he used peg toothed gears. They looked so intriguing, and I've wanted to try building some for as long time. I finally got around to doing it a couple weeks ago. For the body I used 3/8" aluminum, and in one I put 1/4" brass pegs and in the other stainless. Dissimilar metals usually wear better. Shown below are the results.

As with all new things, there are things to be learned, and I learned they need to be properly meshed. In some positions they would hardly run against each other, and in other positions they ran almost as smooth as machine cut gears.
The final use for the gears was in another wind sculpture for the yard to amuse people, as can be seen below.


It is simply an assemblage of used parts, painted some gaudy colors. The rotor turns a shaft that extends down and operates the peg gears, that in turn operate the pedals. The head is fastened to the shaft so it turns with the rotor, and it has a face on both sides so it does a lot of looking around. It is not very normal, but then not much else around here is either, so what the heck.

Birk