This functioning mechanical irs is made from paper templates, foam core poster board, old credit / gift / etc cards, paper clips and masking tape. First, patterns are designed and multiples are printed and laid out to make the 10 parts needed. Two rings are cut out of foam board and a third ring is cut into wedges to form a cam mechanism on top of one of the other two rings.
Twelve shutters are then cut from the credit cards, and small pieces of paper clip are glued to each end and both sides. One side rides the cam mechanism the other side is punched through the final ring.
We found it to be an interesting project that should be pretty easy for just about anyone to replicate (now that its all figured out for us), and besides, you never know when you might stumble across a small box of hotel key’s with a defunct pizza parlor’s advertisement on the back.
“you never know when you might stumble across a small box of hotel key’s with a defunct pizza parlor’s advertisement on the back.”
Huh?
It’s actually a “Plastic Mechanical Iris”. The iris is made of plastic cards (credit, gift, etc). The paper was only used as a template for cutting the plastic to the proper shape.
Where can I find paper credit cards?
Awesome, this is much needed for my Stargate’s security.
@CosmicVoyager
he’s referring to the RFID style hotel keys, they credit-card sized plastic ones, talking about using them for this project
@fartface you could probably recode transit tickets, e.g. BART here in SF, CA’s tickets are CC-sized and the magstrip is in the same location
Hmm.. it’s not very clear how it work. I assumed you have to twist it to open and close the iris but the instructables say that the paperclips go all the way through, which would make twisting impossible. How does it work?
WTB tiny paper stargate.
That project stinks. I’m going to try and make a better one.
Here’s an animated GIF on wikipedia showing how it should work.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Iris_Diaphragm.gif
I´ve build some dieselpunk style goggles some time ago. It´s mechanism is working slightly different and got only 5 blades (i´m lazy!), but it´s easy to rebuild. The blades are made from a tin can, with pieces of a paperclip solded onto. The framing is made from some scrap metal.
Here is a picture of the parts:
http://prof-geisst.deviantart.com/gallery/25832828#/d2ton6x
this is actually from instructables . com
( http://www.instructables.com/id/Paper-Mechanical-Iris/?ALLSTEPS )