Karakuri

This assignment is probably the most hands-on one in this class. It basically asks us to use the print outs of the models of one cam, one crank and one gear to make mechanisms and decorate them as we wish. Nevertheless, though seemed to be very easy, we actually encountered a lot of problems during the building process.

First of all, we started to build the mechanisms according to the instructions in the provided pdf document. Though my partner and I were both trying our best, there were always little details that we failed to carry out 100% perfectly. The accumulative effect of such little imperfections led to the intermittent movements of the mechanisms later on when we were testing them, but we discovered it too late. Luckily, overall the little gadgets worked well, and since we discovered during the presentation that almost every group had the same problem as we did, we started to realize that this may be an intrinsic limitation of paper mechanisms. Nevertheless, we do have to pay more attention in the future so as to carry out the processes in a better manner.

One of the small tricks that I found to be useful was that when cutting the teeth on the gears, I could use the knife to cut the inner lines first and then use the scissors to cut other lines, instead of sticking to the scissors in the beginning which would make the junction parts rough.

These two parts below were EXTREMELY difficult to be glued together, and even a tiny error could result in the flawed motion of the gears.

Another tip that I found helpful was that when folding a narrow piece of paper, I could use a ruler as an external tool. This saved a lot of time and added to the flatness of the surfaces.

After we have finished the building part, we started to generate ideas about decoration. I suddenly thought of the music box, a childhood toy whose appearance looks similar to these mechanisms because their main parts are both driven by the manual rotation of a handle. Therefore, we started to paint them, with the first one being designed as a doll and a teddy bear dancing with each other, the second one a basketball trying to reach the hoop, and the third one a train running across the vast field. However, a disaster nearly happened due to my inattention to the common sense that paints need time to dry, and wet paints can glue one paper part onto another. Fortunately, I separated them carefully and they started to function again.

Overall, this assignment brought us a lot of fun while introducing the basic mechanisms to us effectively at the same time. I really enjoyed working on these cute paper mechanisms!