Two months and 1 week has passed since I last made a post and WHOOOOOOOOO! There was a lot of set backs! So what exactly happened? For starters, it was the mechanism itself. Yes, I discovered a way to create motion for the pop up, but there was one more issue I discovered. How far back I need to pull it to prevent it from going too high on the linkage? So all through out April, I searched the net trying to find other mechanisms to make it work. I was on the verge of giving up the mechanism idea entirely until one day in May, I came across this one mechanism I never thought of before.
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Telescopic mechanics. It was late into that night I had no idea if this would work or not. So I tested another "prototype" in Blender combining everything I knew up to that point about how the telescopic idea actually works.
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So I took the idea of making the Scott Russell mechanism, created a runner out of it and changed the pulling mechanism to have a block on the top. The result?
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When the grey holder block pulls the runner to the green model, via the north rack, the runner stops at a certain point in the body. But the part of the north rack acts as a relay to run inside the space in the runner until it too hits the tiny block preventing the rack from moving any further.
all the while the test model piece that would be controlled by the linkages creates the motion of moving the part in a vertical direction.
For those who wish for a more shortened explanation, I setup blocks in certain parts of the model to create the vertical popup motion with just one movement solving the pop up mechanism dilemma once and for all!
After I finished the applying the idea to the main prototype, in comes the second problem. The wiring setup. I have to figure out how the inner workings of the prop works as far as its lighting system is concerned. Bandai created the Auto Blaster for Carranger and for Power Rangers Turbo respectively. However, there's nothing on the web on the schematics showing how it functions... So this past Thursday, I bought the toy version for 33 dollars on E Bay. Once I get it to my house, I'll open it up see how it works, put it back together and apply what I learned from there to the full sized version.
As of right now, the status of the Auto Blaster that I created is basically done. Just need to figure out where to create the screw threads and it will be ready to print. I'll post a video demo for everything in the not too distant future.
Until next time, see you on the next posting.
