Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Controlled Chaos: Flying Toaster”.
Welcome to another build video, this time we’re going to be doing the flying toasters from the after dark series of screen savers. This was the idea of james burke, a co-worker of mine and our generally awesome dude he’s the founder of the power racing series, which is awesome, uh, the flying toasters. If you don’t remember, there were some old screen, savers called after dark and they had these flying toasters. They were chrome, toasters with wings on them and they flew across the screen. I did a little bit of research and i saw that a group called flight test did um some a flying toaster, but they put big wings on it like an rc airplane. So it didn’t look like the one from the thing it was really cool, though it actually flies pretty good. So i’m going to go the other direction, i’m going to try to build wings that look like the one from the screen saver, but instead of flying, it’s going to make toast like a toaster whenever you push down on the lever the wings flat. So i got to keep it functional. I’Ve done a little bit of research into porno, poppers or flying things that flap their wings and there’s a basic, a basic structure. So you have a shoulder joint, a shoulder, joint and some kind of cam and your cam connects to your wings.
So here’s your wings and they’re connected here to your shoulder joint. So whenever it goes up and down, it pulls your wings up and down. But if we do batteries and motor on separate sides, we could end up with them being um out of sync, so you know instead of flapping perfectly aligned. We end up with like one down here and one up here. You know uh, which is not ideal. So i think to overcome the possibility of them getting out of sync, i really want to drive this all off of one motor.
So if we could do a motor down here somewhere with the cam down here, maybe sideways and connect it. I’M thinking maybe brake cables from a bike out to the wings and then the brake cables will pull our wings up and down and by adjusting those brake cables. I can get the uh.
I can get the motion synchronized now getting a motor and cam system to fit in that bottom part is going to be difficult, but i’ve got an idea. Uh your plain old cassette tape. I think i can pull apart a cassette player, pull the gears and the motor out strap those to the bottom of the toaster and use that to drive a cable system that moves our wings. After that, the only thing left is to build a wing that kind of looks like the one and the thing and put a bunch of feathers on it and make it look all pretty and put a hinge on the side of the toaster.
Let’S look at how this was built now. The first thing you’ll notice, is that i cheated there’s a hole in this surface to hide this unsightly mess. In the end, the tape deck motor just didn’t have enough torque. I had to choose between redoing everything so that that torque would be able to work or just slapping a giant servo on it, the servo one. So, let’s look at what we have here, there is a central motor, in this case a high torque servo. That is spinning around pushing a cable system that goes out to the wings and flaps them up and down, there’s so much hot glue here, it’s crazy aside from perseverance.
I’D have to say that i learned that hot glue is a miracle tool. The problems that i ran into with this thing were: i had issues with this cabling. I’Ve learned since then that i’ve got way too sharp of bins and my cabling for stuff like this. You need nice, big, smooth, curves, or else you end up with a kind of a kink in the line that causes more friction.
If i were to do this all over again, here’s what i would do i’d put real hinges at the top here. Instead of just folded, felt real hinges where the cable attaches to the wing, because that’s a point for some force that doesn’t need to be there. The cable would have a smoother bend and twist around and the motor i would replace, with a smaller higher torque motor that was able to reduce this trash down here considerably. Now, if you were to build one of these, you need to be aware that it is not recommended that you have anything flammable near your toaster.
I’Ve toasted bread on it. I know that these aren’t going to catch fire because it only gets slightly warm on the sides, but this probably is not the best build safety wise. It’S probably best left as just a conversation piece be sure to like and subscribe for more awesome projects from make. If you liked this video subscribe to our website or send us a comment on facebook or twitter be sure to check out our other project videos or visit us on makezine.com, you .