Gyroscopes
Images from the latest building session.
I made a solid wooden frame to hold one of the aluminum pulleys. There's a problem, though. The shaft exhibits a fair degree of wobble when the gyroscope is spun. During critique on Thursday, it was suggested that there should be a piece of metal in the hole so the bottom of the shaft will turn more smoothly. It would be even better to use bearings... which I've now tried.
I salvaged bearings from the read/write heads of two hard disk drives. Mounting the bearings was tricky, though, because they must be precisely aligned. This is even more difficult for me as my bearings aren't the same size. You can see this in my pictures of the PVC pipe gyroscope.
I think I would like to make a gyroscope frame out of metal pipe next.