Category: Ghost Elevator

Miniature elevators

From time to time, I work with my sister, Pat Keck (http://patkeck.com) on animating one of her sculptures. The current project is a Ghost Elevator, which actually contains three approximately 1/10 scale three floor elevators. This means there are 9 miniature sliding elevator doors and a lot of small fussy parts. My sister came up with a door mechanism based on that used in the real deal. Fundamentally it was fine, but she used little hand made Delrin wheels for the door slides riding on brass bar, which proved not to reliably glide and also contained an awful lot of fussy assembly. So I redesigned the glides to use miniature v-groove ball bearings riding on ground drill rod. Since there is very limited space to make things fit, I measured my sister’s door mechanism and put the whole thing into a CAD program (I use TurboCAD). This allowed me to try various options without having to build things. The CAD rendering of the door assembly is below.

CAD rendering of elevator door.

More on this to come.

The Journey Begins

Thanks for joining me.

Having become disturbed by the near daily revelations of issues with Facebook, I closed my Facebook account. Mostly I don’t miss it, but it was nice to use it to show off some of the projects I work on. So I figured I’d give a blog a try. We’ll see how it goes.