Pendulum Wave (Test)

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Ever since the Manchester Makefest this year I've been working on this project in my spare time. I made this pendulum test shortly after. This is a scientific demonstration known as the pendulum wave, each pendulum has a slightly different length so they all swing with different time periods and this creates a neat wave effect. There is a toy already available for this demo but I'm told that it's a pain to get all the string at the right length and that the kit could be better.

I took a shot at my own kit. I built a frame to aid with construction, with the pendulums at a fixed distance from the cross bar it should be easy to get the strings at the right lengths, right? It was definitely worth a try and although setting the strings was relatively easy the whole stringing process was actually quite tedious. The frame was rather insubstantial too and couldn't really take the weight of the all the pendulums. I used a long clamp to strengthen the bar to see how it all worked and I took the video below.

So why am I telling you about a failed design for an interesting kit? I've taken 2 more shots at this kit and details of those will follow but both have been failures. It's eaten up a lot of time and hasn't really got me any closer to figuring out how to make it work so it's up for abandonment. If I'm going to stop development on it I might as well get a few blog posts from the work done so far.


Pendula held in the framework to get the right string lengths
The whole flat pack kit

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