Conclusion/ Lessons Learned

In conclusion, designing a grashof crank rocker mechanism is simple, but building it is not. If any of the pins are aligned even slightly off from where they should be, the resultant angle can be drastically different from what is desired. Also, positioning of the crank rocker links is essential to ensure that no toggling is taking place because it causes major problems in system uncertainty. This was one of our issues, causing our 90 degree crank rocker to toggle and become a 180 degree crank rocker. Because of this, we had to add a stopper that would not allow the rocker to rotate past 90 degrees, however this added further pressure to the links.

Gear trains may be a good way to get a large shift in rotational velocity, but it comes with a cost: if the train is geared up too much, there is a prohibitive amount of force necessary to rotate the input. This was our main limitation with our project because of our implementation of many gears that would gear up the system from a slow hand-cranked input gear to a rotating output gear that would make many more revolutions per input rotation. The torque necessary to rotate this system, however, was much harder to overcome than we had anticipated, leading us to a serious redesign of our system that, while it still worked the way we intended, did not generate the magnitude of output that we initially desired.