Week of 9/22/24

This week I spent working on building a gyroscope in order to figure out how to implement them into my monorail, and to see firsthand how they behave.

My first design used washers that were glued onto a motor. This design didn't work at all and was extremely unstable, with the washers occasionally flying off the motor in random directions. I don't have pictures of this because it broke completely the on the first test.

My second design used two wide wooden discs on the end of a motor, which was way more effective than the previous design, but the discs were only hot-glued to the motor shaft, and flew off several times as well.

In order to secure the discs to the motor properly, I started designing a mount for the gyro. I couldn't make a mount that could hold the 3" wide discs on directly though, as it would have been too heavy and large to be practical. Instead, I took a much smaller disc and fitted it to the motor shaft. Then I attached two rings to the body of the motor, one below the disc and one above, which secured the spinner in place so that it could still spin freely, but stopped it from sliding up and down the shaft. Then the much larger discs were attached to the smaller disc so that they could spin while still secured to the body of the motor.

This worked at first, but the design caused so many vibrations that the motor stripped the fitting on the disc, making it unusable.

To fix this, I attached two discs instead of one, and glued them onto the shaft to secure them further, as well as revised the connections between the gyro's large discs and the mounted spinner. This made the entire design much more stable, and the gyro spun with almost no vibrations at all.