Designing Bright Orange Machinery

The "Man of Steel" category is one I started using last year when I went back to Tech School in my dotage.  It made literal sense then, as I was taking a machining class.  Metal was drilled, turned, cut.

This semester I am taking a Mechanical Design class.  Not much metal involved but I did not feel like making a new category tag.

The last project of the semester had us working in small groups.  We had to design a mechanism with four hinged bars.  It had to move the final bar between a specified set of degree parameters.  There was.....actual math involved.  It had likely been 40 years since I tried to do calculations involving cosines.  

In that area I don't think I was much help to the team, but I was somewhat more useful when it came time to outsource the non printed parts.  My workshop contains anything you could use in a project of this sort and a handful of components from an old Vex robotics kit served us well.  I also, not surprisingly can hammer out a technical report with ease.  You just have to have a sense of how far you can push the humor.  When one graph was put in upside down I decided to leave it there, explaining that we were anticipating the Australian market to be a major sales opportunity.

Anyway, here's the gizmo.  The orange parts were all designed on the computer and 3D printed.