I watched the youtube video of the author making the wooden gear and I was amazed at his level of craftsmanship, and how effortless it looked for him to make the gear. It's magical to watch.

I suppose for a non-programmer it may appear that hackers do the same sort of magic, except with a computer.

I've enjoyed his site for a while now and I think I posted this on HN before, but my favorite post is him making his own bandsaw (this is the second version): http://woodgears.ca/bandsaw/homemade.html

I bought the plans and hope to start on my own next month.

I also liked the Jenga pistol:

http://woodgears.ca/jenga_pistol/index.html

It's a very satisfying way to cheat.

Also, check out his "eyeball game" - a test of your visual geometry ability: http://woodgears.ca/eyeball/index.html

Also, the requisite mention of the PIPE ORGAN he built.

http://www.sentex.net/~mwandel/organ/organ.html

Gosh, this is so awesome!

If you're interested in this sort of thing it wouldn't hurt to get an estimate from a water-jet cutting place. It's a really good process for cutting complex 2D shapes in flat materials for low-volume production runs.

(Of course you need to get the gear outline into an appropriate file format first.)

Have you compared waterjet and laser prices? There's a shop down the street from me that will do custom laser cutting (in Masonite or wood) but they want me to bring in an EPS file to get a price quote. What should I expect to pay?

You're mostly paying for labor, and they generally charge for an hour -- so get as much done at once as you can.

You can also use either process with Aluminum sheet. both have their advantages.

Maybe not the right place for this, but why is gxs's comment dead? It's factually correct (as far as I can tell), and provides more related reading material.

It looks like a mod killed his account by mistake. I unfortunately see a LOT of dead comments that are perfectly fine. Usually they are preceded by a single bad comment, which at least explain why their account was killed, but I see nothing in gxs's comment history.

There isn't really any way to ask for reinstatement except to email pg - that's if the person even realizes their account killed, since the system conceals this from them.

Hi, thanks to both of you for bringing this to my attention. I don't believe my account was dead, as my last comment received a reply.

It may have happened because initially when I edited the comment for a typo, it displayed duplicate comments after I hit update. So naturally, afterward I deleted one of them. My guess is I got caught by some spam filter or something.

For what it's worth, my original comment was just pointing people to Matthias Wandel's site: http://www.sentex.net/~mwandel/ where he actually has lots of cool projects. In particular I like the marble machines and his demo on how combination locks work.

I guess your account is active again, but this comment http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1809590 is still dead. Don't know why.

this also appears to have happened to Dav3xor on this article: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1810165

His binary adder is awesome too: http://woodgears.ca/marbleadd/

"..but that's no problem, I can just cut that off with an angle grinder."

I'm going to try to use that solution for some of my daily problems...

This is great. Does anyone have examples of simple machines that can be built with gears like this?

Hmm. Maybe go to a LEGO fan site like lugnet? There're always people showing off this or that differential geared thingie.