Solar System Orrery

[dragonator]

It is not a prop, but it is in progress.

I often bend my current projects for instructables contests, and sometimes start a project on my list when a good contest comes along. Now I thought of a project when I saw a contest. http://www.instructables.com/contest/space2016/. Don't get me wrong, the T60 power armor and the HP45 are both great projects, one extremely useful and the other extremely awesome. But both are extremely long duration projects and I have not made something nice in a while. With the space contest being a thing, I wanted to make an orrery.

SS orrery Y00-A01-00 WIP4.JPG (239.15 KiB) Viewed 51229 times

An orrery is a mechanical model of the solar system or parts of it. I first tried to make one of just the sun, earth and moon, but that proved more difficult than 8 planets with a moon (more relations, more difficult gears). This is a fully 3D printed orrery with all the planets from Mercury to Saturn and with a spinning moon. The movement starts at the sun spinning every 25 days or so. From there on out it gears to Mercury, which orbits at 87 days. From there on out, it gears down all the way to Saturn, at 29.5 years. I have the gears designed up until Neptune, but that would make this build very big. The orrery is accurate to somewhere withing 0.1% and 0.05%, depending on the planet. The gearing alone took me a good couple of hours and an automated excel sheet.

Thus far I have put 15 hours of CAD in here, and I am essentially done. I will start printing this week and should be done in a few weeks more (before the contest deadline). While printing I will continue on my other projects.

In the future I will make a sun earth moon orrery too, but that is not going to be before the contest, so that will be some other time.

[ezrec]

Very sweet!

Can't wait to print that.

[dragonator]

Update time. It has been a while since I posted anything, so here it is.

Printing is 80% done. I have printed all the gears, gear arms, legs and Jupiter. The base had an SD card error 95% in. It is usable, but I want to reprint it again. A few planets and the sun remain. All gears are printed in gold, while all frame parts are printed in black. The planets are printed in Bronzefill (or possibly copperfill, I don't really know what I am using). I still need to polish it to a metal sheen. I have included space for a slipring so I can print the sun in a more clear plastic and light it up.

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After the coming weekend I will be completely done with printing. I have to wait on the 688 bearings that run in the center gears. I also still need to make a simple pipe bending tool to bend the brass tubes. after that, I can assemble the orrery.

I am quite busy with some mandatory things right now so do not expect much on the power armor or the HP45 in a few weeks. I am still slowly working on it, but other things take priority right now.

[dragonator]

The orrery is done

http://ytec3d.com/orrery/



The Instructable will be posted in the next day or two.

[dragonator]

Well, that went better than expected. I won something with the Orrery. It did even better than I had hoped. I would have been happy with a t-shirt. Up to the next project.

http://www.instructables.com/contest/space2016/

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[Intilli]

I love it Dragonator. I think yours should have won first place.