Mechanical Rotary Counter

I've always been fascinated with mechanical counters; such intricate mechanisms in a small package. How do they work?! Here I make a rotary dial counter with soup cans and plywood!

The magic lies in a special gear that has 8 teeth on one half and 4 teeth on the other half along with a matching gear with just one notch; this allows the rotors to iterate rather than spin freely. Matthias Wandel has an excellent write up of the mechanism for those interested:

https://woodgears.ca/counter/

He went down the route of having and increment/decrement lever, but I've always wanted to know how dial/turns counters work so I had to take one apart to see what the mechanism actually consisted of.

This is rough, obviously it was a lot of trial and error just to see how things worked, and a second version made of solid wood with larger parts would function smoother. Think of this really as just a proof of concept. It makes me have even more respect for how these things are manufactured at such a small scale and function flawlessly.

Matthias also has a gear template generator that I used for all of my gears, found here:

https://woodgears.ca/gear_cutting/tem...



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