IV) Manufacturing and Assembly

Manufacturing

Manufacturing the mechanism was a relatively straightforward process, especially because I was doing everything on the laser cutter, which makes the process a lot quicker and smoother. 

For laser cutting, I created a drawing out of all of the SolidWorks designs I had made for the mechanism and saved them as PDFs. This allowed me to then upload the PDFs to the software used to laser cut the pieces. The manufacturing process from there was fairly easy. The laser cutter cut the plywood in the shape of the design I created. 

Because the tolerance of the laser cutter is extremely small and almost negligible, I had no issues with the size of the holes or the overall product so I did not have to go back and make any changes to my design.

For the board in which I would mount the mechanism, I decided to also make it out of 1/4" wood, as shown in Figure 1 below. In this, I made two holes in which the bolt from the center of the flywheel would go through and the screw that served as the grounded pin that traveled through the slot. Additionally, I decided to make two vertical markings on the board to let me know where the sliders should be placed so that the mechanism would be in accordance with the calculations previously made. 

Figure 1. Mounting Board (two holes in the left bottom corner and two vertical markings in the right top corner)

Assembly

Assembling the mechanism ended up being more complicated than I initially planned for it to be. Putting the bolts, nuts, and washers onto the links and attaching the links to the board was a quite simple process. It was not until it came down to figuring out where the drawer slides should be positioned that things began to get complicated. The sliders that I had initially bought were 12 in long, which at the time I thought would suffice; however, when it came down to testing the mechanism, the slider was not long enough for the motion of the slider. Additionally, the bottom part of the bolt that attached the slotted link and the link that then attaches to the slider was sticking out too much and hitting the cabinet slides at a point throughout its movement, preventing the mechanism to fully complete the rotation as planned. I was able to solve this issue by adding a lot of washers at the top of the links in order to shorten up the length of the bolt that protruded from the bottom of the links. As for the length of the slides being too short, I had to make another trip to the hardware store to buy cabinet slides that were 18 in long instead. Testing the mechanism and the slides before actually drilling them down onto the board was a challenge as well, as they would move everywhere, so I bought some duct tape to hold it all in place and make sure that it worked. Once I was comfortable with the position of the slides, I secured them with screws on the board. 

Figure 2. Final Assembly of Mechanism