Designing - Arms Pt. 1

Now, this is where it gets fun. So far I've just made a pair of very shallow wooden boxes. The idea I came up with had several variations, most of which I've drawn in my notepad, here are the pictures.

A very quick sketch to get a rough idea of what I was thinking

You can get a pretty decent idea of what I was going for with this picture. The rectangle is the frame/body/housing of the setup, I wasn't sure how that was going to work yet. The solid lines are one position and the dotted lines are another position. Each larger circle represents a joint. The curved line is the hull of the kayak.

The idea was to have a folding arm system that could extend and retract the panels, they could extend to give them more clearance from the boat (more on why that's needed later on) and retract to minimize drag in the case of high winds or in the case of the kayak tipping.

Many different variations

Here I was trying to figure out how the arms would attach to the frame/body/housing and how many joints would be needed. Because I was planning on doing each joint with a proper bearing and axle I needed to know approximately how many bearings to order.

The design I actually ended up using isn't any of these.

You can see an idea for the frame/body/housing at the very bottom, again, not what I ended up doing. The front profile drawing with one panel extended and the other partially retracted is pretty much the actual design.

The drawings on the top half of the page are more variations of the previous picture. Not what I ended up using.

At this point, I thought I had a pretty good idea of what I wanted so I moved into TinkerCAD. I am very sorry to say, but I did not keep the TinkerCAD files of the various designs I went through. Rather than creating a new file for each iteration I just deleted everything and started again. While this was convenient at the time I now have nothing to look back at.

Here is the final design I settled upon. (well... final enough)

The red axles are the attachment point for the panel.

Here you can see the arm cloned and arranged with the completed panels. The arms are positioned to show both positions.



I've moved the plexiglass sheets to the side, they don't render properly in the TinkerCAD embed.

In this model you can see the drive axles running along the spine, I'll be attaching servos to each and using them to extend and retract the panels. The U-shaped pieces in dark brown are what I thought I would use to attach the arms to but that ended up different as well.

The arms are not positioned completely flat like in the model. They hang down to allow the arms to be extended properly.