For years, GearLab ™ has been gathering crowds at Maker Faires, Art Galleries and Conventions. One of the things we love most about it is the seemingly magical attraction that brings together total strangers to work cooperatively , exploring gear interactions and kinetic art.
However, when the group of strangers includes small children, at some point during the day there would come that moment when someone grabbed the handle and cranked while someone else had fingers in the gear train. We always had a responsible team member keeping an eye on interactions with GearLab™ when children were involved. The startle of the yowl created from pinched fingers always caused the crank turner to freeze, even if they did not realize they caused the problem, and no one has been seriously hurt. However, this idea haunted our engineering team and they wanted to find a solution that still allowed teams to build large, complex ( often multi-layer) gears trains, with some protective features.
After a lot of white boarding and tinkering, our engineering team is happy to release a magnetic slip clutch crank handle that will release when something is jammed into the gear train.
This is an exciting new feature and will be included in the Gearlab package we are delivering to a school media center in Texas in March.
For more information email shop@cogbots.com .
More video of slip clutch testing is available on our YouTube Channel