Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Giant Mechanical Iris! Cut on a CNC Router Parts PRO60120”.
One of the things that drew me to this house was this cool spiral staircase, I absolutely fell in love with it and I knew one day. I’D have to do an awesome project just to top it all off. So what I think would be cool would be to put a mechanical iris at the top of this stairwell. You know like the the iris inside of a camera that opens and closes so. The first thing I did was I designed a few of them for 3d.
Printing, I prototype them out at different sizes, and I learned a lot. I learned that different parts that were necessary to make it work and how they were constructed, and I also kind of learned that I wasn’t going to be able to scale one up and build it at 4 feet wide with the tools that I had available. If I were to try to do it by hand or with a jigsaw with my skills, it wasn’t going to turn out great. I mentioned this project and passing to my friends at CNC router parts and they got so excited and they asked if they could partner with us to make it happen. It’S blew me away.
Not only were they going to supply the tools necessary to put this giant mechanical iris together, they sent out an expert to make sure it went well. I’M Nathan skulky, I’m one of the co-owners at CNC router parts. We make industrial CNC machines for your business or home shops that you assemble.
So here is, you can see. I’Ve got all this space here, that’s unused, it’s cool, but there’s like this unfinished edge, and I mean your house is so unique and weird. I thought it would be cool if I could put like a mechanical iris here to open them clothes. I know I told you about it on the phone and yes, I might be I’ll, be really cool.
Tell me what you think about it. Can we do that? Like is that doable? So when you talked to me, I didn’t really understand this. Was gon na be a perfectly round root? That’S perfect! We’Re gon na be able to cut something that fits in here really snug. It’S going to look like it’s fully integrated into the house, and it’s gon na really surprise people, I think when they see it open and shut.
So I think this is a slam really cool normally I’d, say the largest challenge with a project like this is the design, but using fusion 360 we’ll be able to layout the parts I think like two or three layers and actually do all the motion. Studies in CAD for me generally, the challenge is making all these weaves that will work together in a somewhat non-trivial way and knowing before we make it that it’s going to actually work and close. As far as we want to so using motion studies and fusion will help us visualize and understand if our design is correct before we make it alright, I think we have a shared vision for what this thing should look like, and do I’ve decided to design and Make a smaller desktop version of this make sure that the leaves open and closed correctly. That there’s not too much friction basically just work at a more manageable scale and make sure I know about what we’re heading into and can troubleshoot some things beforehand.
That’S most basic and IRAs, like this uses two plates to cause the leaves to pivot and slide through their movement, arts and that’s responsibility of this fixed plate, and this moving plate ended up making the gearing and the moving plate. One part when I fabricated this, though, if I were to spend a bit more time on it, it could be interesting to see them done separately and maybe have a gearing may as some contrasting metal anyway. Next, I have a fixed plate at the top to retain this entire assembly and act along with this, bearing ring as a joint for the moving plate. Of course, we also have a drive, motor and drive gear, which I’ve made a pocketed, mount interface for and the rest is basically just standard Hardware, Fair, fasteners, standoffs, etc.
Scaling this design up to the full 40 inch outer diameter stairwell is primarily accomplished by modifying the parameters of the design. However, now that Caleb and I have iterated on this a bit – we’ve realized that we want to invert the entire assembly. So if the motor is facing up towards the skylight and at the lower fixed plate will now double as the facade of the mechanical iris, the part you see when you look up not a big deal, though we do need to open up this plate of it. I think and expose the gear ring mechanicals and just kind of make it look a bit more interesting that should do it.
We’Ve also made the fixed plates the same diameter as the stairwell that we’re going to be installing this in and also done some weight reduction on the moving parts and some of the fixed portions using pockets and patterns. After all, what good is an awesome skylight if you can’t lift it above your head to install it? This will also help reduce friction, so I’m very excited about some of these changes for this project. We’Re going to use a pro 60 120.
So that’s a 5 foot by 10 foot machine, one of our industrial category, machines that you can use for your business or your home shop, [ Applause ]. I was blown away by how fast everything went. I was able to cut all of the parts for this. Pretty much within one day, it took a little bit longer because I was figuring out how to use everything. But if you had all the design ready to go, you could cut it very fast.
Speaking of the design, the folks at CNC router parts were so excited about this. They completely designed this thing from scratch. They didn’t use my designs and they’re, giving them away there’s a link to the design down below. So here it is installed and fully functional.
I can flip a switch and it opens or closes. It’S got an Arduino controlling a stepper motor for opening and closing, which means you can put any number of sensors or other kinds of things on it to make it do whatever you want, control it by temperature by light amount. Whatever this is so exciting. I’Ve wanted to do this project for so so long, and here it is now the speed is variable.
Personally, I like it at this nice slow pace, it’s smooth and elegant any faster, and it just seems kind of harsh and scary any time that I finish a big project like this. I like to look back at it and see what I could do differently or even possibly better. The first thing that you probably notice is that it doesn’t close all the way, there’s always a gap at the center of it.
Whenever it’s closed, that’s just due to the nature of this type of mechanical iris, if you have, the overlapping leaves like this, no matter how you do it, it’s going to end up with a little bit of a gap at the center. I was willing to live with that. I knew that going in there are other designs where you have less petals that all just meet at the center that look more mechanical, but personally, I liked the almost organic nature of the overlapping petal design. So that’s why I chose it. These bolts, as it turns out in this design, are completely unnecessary.
I can remove them and I haven’t decided if I like the way they look enough to keep them or not, I might replace them with something more aesthetically pleasing this. One is controlled with a stepper motor, so even though you could use it to regulate temperature from the skylight or light, or something like that, I’m not going to because of the layout of the room. That’S attached to this, it’s not going to have that big of an impact. I might replace that stepper motor with a hand crank just because I think it would be cool.
I don’t know I’ll have to have some fun with it. Once again, I want to say thank you so much to CNC router parts for partnering with us on this project. This is so cool, be sure to LIKE and subscribe for more you .