In this piece, a hand crank turns a bunch of cams that raise and lower a series of rings in a simulated wave pattern, apparently in response to the motion of a sphere on a central shaft. The original (shown in the animation to the right) was made from wood by a fellow named [Dean O’Callaghan], and a video of it in its entirety is embedded below the break.
If this sort of thing piques your interest, you can see examples of some modern takes on the art or marvel at the 240 year old clockwork masterpiece known as the “Boy Writer”.
That thing is cool!
Is it me, or do those waves go towards the center? Its probably optics, but it feels somewhat wrong to me.
You are not wrong. Either he’s cranking the wrong way or the cam is installed reversed, either it’s showing the moment when the drop bounces back from the liquid, being launched to a smaller height than the initial one, repeating the cycle.
It is probably just a strobe effect caused by the camera, you know like wagon wheels that appear to spin backwards in the old Western movies.
B^)
At any rate, while the overall movement is quite pretty, for me it does not evoke a water droplet.
I just CAM here to post a pun.
the third ring (counting from outside) seems to be stuck at at a certain level – it should drop lower but it doesn’t. It’s not ‘firing’ right.
The video is a classic wooden version, and possibly not as smooth as a plastic one.
Incidentally, I wonder how hard it was to get all those different sized rings made out of wood, seems 3D printing is probably much easier, although perhaps chrome rings might look spiffier. But you could put any kind of ring on either a wood or plastic version I suppose, or if you put LED rings on it and scale it up sell it either as modern art or to coca-cola to mount vertically in NYC :)
Surely this would make VASTLY more sense as a laser cutter project. Almost all of the pieces are flat!