Wooden Orrery

This is a short video of a wooden Orrery I recently made. It shows the paths of Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. The path of the Earths moon is also shown. The Orrery is driven by a small DC motor at the moment but I intend to replace this with a stepper motor so that the orrery can run at real time, 100 times, 1000 times etc. The current date for any planet configuration will be shown on a LCD module. Please excuse Saturn's fried egg look. The rings have started to delaminate.

Category:

Howto & Style

Tags:

• Wooden Orrery
• Orrery
• wooden machine
• solar system
• planets

[identernet]

Thanks for your comments. I used to make wooden clocks but found the market very small. Unfortunately on Ebay everyone wants something for nothing so I think I would struggle to sell any after the trouble of making them, or kits!! Would love to sell then knowing something I had designed would be left around after I had gone. (not too soon I hope)

[identernet]

Hi

Thanks for that. I designed it using solidworks. The main problem was working out the gearing for the orbits. Probably took me about two weeks to do the design and about a month to make. All the parts were made on a CNC router I built some time ago. Wouldn't like to cut the parts out by hand!!

[MrChadnadir]

Any chance of the plans? It would be great to be able to make one of these...

[identernet]

@MrChadnadir Hi

Unfortunately all my design was done in Solidworks and my "plans" are in DXF file format ie no dimensions. I constructed this on my CNC router which only requires DXF files and haven't put them into any readable format. You would be more than welcome to them otherwise.

[aoxilus]

I guess the sun is bigger ?

[identernet]

@aoxilus A lot. Probably bigger than my living room if I scaled it to the earth.

[metalfusionf]

@identernet Don't underestimate the people, I'm sure the dxf files can be sorted out and dimensioned in a few hours max. :) You should post the solidworks & dxf files to somewhere like Thingiverse. The diy cnc community is also quite large, and we all love to make stuff like this.

[orrerystore]

beautiful mechanical orrery sold on (triple w).orrery.cc

made mainly from brass,amazing orrery,valueable to have...e

[Mark5058]

I think if you sold this on e-bay a lot of people would be interested

[63jarnold]

This was great! How long did it take you to build it? Did you cut the gears using anything special in the way of tools? Beautiful job

[MrChadnadir]

@identernet Ah well, I'm most of the way through designing a basic one myself now (I want to start off small, just Earth, the moon and the inner planets). Thanks anyway.