Crankshaft Troubles

It was really hard to drive my crankshafts with my little servo motor. The first thing I tried was to connect the ends together with a rod like a train wheel.

This didn't work as well as I hoped because the measurements weren't precise enough, 

and the cardboard wasn't rigid enough. The rod kept on breaking on me. 

I rebuilt the box out of pvc foam and cut gears out of pvc foam to fit a belt that I had.

Tried this method of marking placement first with the teeth on the belt facing in, but this yielded a gear that didn't match up with the belt. When I marked it this way, with the teeth on the belt facing out, the gear meshed smoothly with the belt.

There was too much slack in the belt, so I added a tensioner.

 

Last minute adjustments to allow it to move more smoothly:

Kept the belt from slipping off.

The gear with the servo on it was farther away from the surface than the other gears, 

so I built a mini-ramp to ease it into place.

This worked great until I added all the lights and fiber optics into the mix:

     I would like to rebuild this in the future and use stronger material to get it working. The crankshafts were fine, but the housing was too flexible, so when I added the fishing line across the top to keep the led fronds up, it warped the sides. This caused the gears not to run properly and the belt kept falling off. This was also too much strain on the little servo motor I believe. 

     I would have liked to make this out of clear resin and I would make the all the crankshafts driven by gears. I would have made a band of metal around the top with maybe some metal bracers running in a grid format over the top to keep the shape strong.