Subject:
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Re: Has anyone ever tried to design a washing machine mechanism?
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.technic
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Date:
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Thu, 27 Jul 2000 10:08:13 GMT
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Viewed:
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976 times
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In lugnet.technic, Geoffrey Hyde writes:
> The bowl itself would either have to be a special piece of material not made
> out of LEGO or we'd have to wait until they produced one for us
Duplo set 2983 includes a barrel that's about 6 studs in diameter by 9 or 10
high. You'd need to drill the bottom for the agitator axle, but I think
that's only a "venial" sin among purists, compared to introducing a
"foreign element" ;-)
Other possibilities might be the 8- and 10-stud octagonal domes used in
various space and underwater models.
> I hope someone has tried at least the mechanism, it would be interesting to
> see how to design the rotational movement power for the washing tub changing
> to a cam-based movement
I think the agitator and the tub are concentric, but separate, mechanisms.
Iirc, the tub on mine is stationary during the wash and rinse cycles,
letting the agitator do *all* the agitating work.
> I think cams would be a key element somewhere in
> this.
They could be: it depends on how much the agitator actually rotates.
A possibility, if you were willing to accept a limit of, say, 120 degrees
of rotation, would be to put a fixed arm perpendicular to the agitator
axle (a pin in a 40-tooth gear might do this). Then connect that arm to
something equivalent to the rod in a car engine. At the other end of the rod
would be either a car-like crankshaft, or a reciprocating mechanism like a
pneumatic cylinder.
The net effect is to turn the reciprocating motion of the rod into partial
back-and-forth rotation of the agitator. The travel of the recirprocating
mechanism has to be chosen to that it doesn't swing the agitator arm through
too many degrees. I picked 120 because it seemed fairly safe: it
completely eliminates the risks of going full circle and of "lock-up" if
the two arms get parallel. I *think* there's also a variation in the amount
of leverage the reciprocating mechanism gets, based on the angular
position of the arm attached to the agitator: i.e., that arm looks like a
varying-length lever to the reciprocator. I'd have to try it to be sure,
but that's what my mental model feels like.
Ran
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