1) Project Background

Due to the coronavirus, the regular semester project was changed to one that could be done from home. As a result, I chose to do the Karakuri Dragon from the book Karakuri by Keisuke Saka.

This dragon uses 2 cams on a shaft to convert rotational input into vertical movements that alternate. On the dragon, the two horns move up and down, and their motion alternates due to the cams phase of 180 degrees. For my project, I built the camshaft mechanism and added aesthetic features to make it look like a dragon. I also conducted kinematic analysis on the horns to graph both of the horns’ displacements with respect to time and compared that plot to the actual performance of the built mechanism.