Here are a few pictures from my Thanksgiving weekend with my family:
I played golf on Wednesday with my brothers and my dad. Here we (or they) are at the club house at Herman waiting on our carts:
And here is Brad making his first birdie. He putted the ball in from where he's standing to make birdie.
And then the weather started to turn against us:
And we had to quit after 10 holes and make a mad dash for the safety of the club house:
On Thursday, we had 14 of us meet up over at my grandmother's house for lunch and to spend the afternoon together. I also used this opportunity to give Ethan his pull toy that I made. Here he is playing with his new toy:
Ethan showing off how well he can stand:
Ethan and Uncle Keith playing:
On Friday, I went to the Texas A&M vs. t.u. game in College Station with my parents and little brother. Here is the Fightin' Texas Aggie Band doing the ATM formation:
And here is the final score, and the final image of Coach Fran at Kyle Field:
Let me start off by saying that I really have a problem completing projects. This one is a great example...
I got the idea to build a toy for my nephew, Ethan, about a year ago when I saw his nursery. I decided I wanted to build him a pull toy that went along with the sheep theme. I even borrowed some of the paint that my brother used on the walls so that the toy would match.
Being an engineer (and a somewhat nerdy engineer to boot), I wanted to make it mechanized. I also secretly hope that it will inspire Ethan to grow up with a similar fascination for mechanical things like I did. Anyway, thinking back to my studies in college, I figured out that I could create a mechanism that would turn rotational motion (wheel spinning) into a motion that looked like a jumping sheep. Being the nerd that I am, I even created an Excel spreadsheet to figure out what dimensions for the mechanism would give me the motion I was looking for. Here's a screen capture of the spreadsheet:
With that done, the time came to build a prototype. While working on this, I realized that if I had the jumping mechanism hooked up directly to the drive wheel, then the sheep wouldn't jump in the direction that the toy is moving when pulled. This meant that I needed to add a set of gears to reverse the motion of the mechanism. This also turned out to be a blessing because it allowed for a gear reduction to slow the jumping of the sheep. I tried looking for a set of gears, but I couldn't find any, and so I decided to try making my own. Here's what I came up with:
And here's the jig I used on my drill press to drill the holes for the large gear:
With that done, the time came to build the finished mechanism, and here's how it turned out:
And here's the motion it produces (sorry, but I had the radio going when I recorded the video):
I got all of the work up to this point done in about 2 or 3 days spread out over two weekends, and then I hit a few snags. I didn't really like how the body of the toy turned out (as seen in the above video), so that meant I would have to start over on that. Also, I couldn't find any wheels that had a large enough diameter (determined by the size of the small gear). When I finally did wheels that would work, the hole for the axle was larger than the hole I had drilled in the smaller gear, which meant that I would have to remake the smaller gear (it's hard to enlarge a hole and still keep it centered). Since I'm never thrilled about starting over, I ended up putting off finishing the project for the next 9 or 10 months.
Now that Ethan is getting close to walking, I decided that it was about time to finish his toy. With a new-found determination (and a few free weekends), I pressed on toward the goal, and this was the final product:
