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Project for the wife

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silvreclips

15+ Year Contributor
1,281
348
Jul 19, 2005
Greenville, South_Carolina
I'm sure most of you guys have similar problems, the wife tasks you with projects that she wants done. This one was fun so thought I would share.

My wife is big into Christmas, and every year she loves decorating the tree. The problem is we have to many ornaments to display on our tree, we push it into a corner so we only get about half of the tree to look at.

But if the tree rotates around we can utilize the entire tree. After some Google searches I found 1 live tree stand that rotates. But since I like to do things the hard way, I designed my own.

It really wasn't all that complicated, a large bearing to take the load, a slip ring for the lights, and then just have to drive it with a small motor. I 3d printed all of the gears from abs. Everything has been made, I just need to sand the plates and put it together. Should be able to test it this weekend. The gearmotor turns at 5rpm, and I geared it down another 7:1, so I should be around 0.7 rpm. I may add a speed controller to slow it down even more, not really sure yet.

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Happy Wife, Happy LIFE!!!! :tease: :thumb: (says the single man) ROFL
Cool setup. That should really make her happy and think, you can have it spin while you put the garland on, viola!!! :)
 
Im impressed with the print quality on those gears. What do you have for a 3D printer?
Why do you find them impressive? I'm not at all saying that they're bad, just saying that I've never seen a 3D printer do any of a worse job.
 
Why do you find them impressive? I'm not at all saying that they're bad, just saying that I've never seen a 3D printer do any of a worse job.

Maybe that is normal finish now since the printer technologies have been advancing so rapidly. But I tried gears with ABS on my printer several years ago and had some problems getting clean teeth. I would get stray filament laying in the tooth that required a bunch of post processing of the part to make it usable as gearing.

Actually, Now that I look at his close up picture of the pinion I am seeing similar stuff to what I had going on just not as bad. I was just curious what his printing rig was.
 
It's all about finding the sweet spot for a given material. It changes with brand, color, and age.

There are TON of parameters you have control over when building a gcode and sometimes it's the tiniest stuff that causes issues like that. With more test prints it should be able to do even better, but it's likely not necessary for this application LOL!

My best quality printer is the cheapest and oldest of the bunch (monoprice i3). The reason it works so well is all the testing I have done to find optimal settings for various materials on that machine.
 
I'm not sure on the printer brand. A friend printed these for me. The gears turned out very good, the small gear had some small strings on it, but it wasn't bad enough for me to even clean them off.

I assembled the stand today, the plates didn't line up as good as I hoped and the gear mesh was getting tight on one side. I opened up the holes some and got things aligned better. The motor is also a bit noisy, hoping that gets muffled once all of the skirting is around the tree.

I was able to sit on it and it still turn so I think I have enough torque to turn a tree.

This plant will be test until we get the real tree.
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Well it must be sturdy!
I was thinking thats one hell of a different Christmas tree than I ever had ROFL
Good job on the fab and final assembly work!:thumb:
 
Well the tree stand project was very successful. I ended up adding a speed controller to the motor. It's now turning about 1 rev every 2.5 min.

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Pretty cool. Wish I studied engineering :cry:

Its like any other job, it's has some cool aspects, but still a lot of BS we have to deal with.

The power for the lights is ran through a slip ring. That black plastic piece in the the middle of the gear with the wires sticking out. The bottom side is stationary and plugs into the wall. The top side can spin and I wired the other side of the plug to it.
 
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