In this project, my group of four was tasked with creating a kinetic sculpture. We decided on a design revolving around a farm setting. The main housing would depict a windmill with a farmer waving towards the viewer. However, viewing the entire sculpture, it becomes clear that the farmer is not waving at the viewer but waving goodbye to a cow being abducted by an alien.
My focus in this project was to design and manufacture the mechanism responsible for the cow's movement up and down. I created a vertical scotch-yoke mechanism controlled by a belt drive that translated rotational movement into linear vertical movement when the sculpture was turned on.
I designed the cow and scotch-yoke mechanism using SolidWorks and utilized GrabCAD to collaborate with my team on the project. I fabricated the scotch yoke by laser-cutting acrylic, used a CNC router to manufacture the cow and wooden housing and plasma-cut the farmer out of aluminum.
