Kinetic Sculpture Commission

The goal of this artist commission project was to replicate the aesthetic of an existing kinetic sculpture (a previous commission of the same artist), but scale it down from 6 feet long to 2 feet long, and to simplify the control mechanism (fewer motors & micro-controllers to reduce points of failure). The ultimate goal was to provide a reasonably affordable, repeatable, & serviceable digital design & material list so that the sculpture may be reproduced & maintained at a smaller scale.

I did not have access to the original design documents, just the video of the finished project, so I had to devise the layout and mechanisms from scratch.

Fusion 360 was used for 2D & 3D design, as well as CAM work. The body of the piece was CNC routed, aluminum shafts were hand-cut and tapped, lettering was fiber-laser cut out of aluminum at SRI in Vancouver, WA, and labeling was done in Illustrator and cut on a vinyl plotter. Painting & Finishing was done by hand by Darcy Neal.

See the artist’s original here & reproduction miniatures here

The most challenging aspects of the project were:

1. Modifying the design to fit off the shelf components (custom pulley loop lengths are expensive)
2. Getting all 11 shafts to run off a single motor
3. Spacing and layering letter components so that the letters were as large as possible without any component interference