3) Kinematic Analysis - Bolt Cutters

When operating bolt cutters, it would be helpful to know the mechanical advantage the system is utilizing to cut the desired material. For example, it would be helpful to know your advantage based on the thickness of the material you were trying to cut. It would also be helpful to know the mechanical advantage based on how open you were holding the handles in case you were unsure of the material's thickness, but were able to estimate the operator's interfacing end. 

Therefore, there are two key outcomes from this kinematic analysis:

    1. Mechanical advantage vs. material thickness

    2. Mechanical advantage vs. handle angle

In order to obtain these results, multiple relationships between other linkage vectors must be calculated. These include the ratio of, and therefore, the velocities of the output and in areas of interest. Additionally, to obtain values for material thickness, jaw position is required across the range of motion.

Once I had set goals for analysis, I measured the link lengths of the bolt cutters image, and then I scaled them to 24" size: a common size used for metals.

To verify my intuition of how the links moved, I constructed a two dimensional sketch to scale in SOLIDWORKS, and I later found it to be an excellent method of verifying position results yielded by my code. 

Now that I was confident in which parameters were dependent on each other, he next step in the analysis was to create a diagram and develop a system of equations to relate linkage position, angular velocity, and linear velocity.