Joe Freedman's Amazing Cycloid Drawing Machine

during this review of mr. Friedman's cycloid drawing machine I'm going to be saying a lot of good things about it I want to make it clear upfront that I have not invested in his venture he is not paying me nor has he asked me to make this video I am doing it to express my appreciation or what I consider an outstanding piece of engineering you may not be able to judge a book by its cover but you can usually tell the quality of an item by the care with which it was packed for shipment in this instance my machine was packed better than anything I have ever received through the mail it was double boxed with ample padding around the inner box the inner box has the highest quality cardboard perfectly sized to sip a 50 machine for long-term storage when I opened it up for the very first time this is what I found every piece was carefully placed in a specially designed holding container the first thing I did was to carefully remove and inspect every piece every gear was perfect every piece of wood was perfect there wasn't a single scratch or dent on any of these pieces this to me reflects a pride of construction that you just don't find these days and this really increased the value of this machine to me in the following videos if you see any marks or Mars they weren't there when I unpacked it that is simply for me using this for many many hours I particularly liked and appreciated that all of the small pieces were carefully packaged and labeled so you knew exactly what was in each package this made the initial assembly very very easy the main body of the machine is shipped and stored underneath the organizer it comes assembled in the easiest drawing format all you have to do is add a bolt here and one here and slip an arm over it and you're drawing your first drawing within literally 30 seconds to 1 minute after unpacking it the machine comes with three main turntables a 150 tooth table is on the machine initially and underneath it there is a hundred and twenty tooth wheel and a hundred and forty-four tooth wheel I want to draw attention to the outstanding quality of the manual that comes with the drawing machine everything is carefully explained three different ways through pictures and descriptions in a menu format and then with pictures and this is done for each of the five initial examples that help you work your way through and understand the machine this is without a doubt the best manual for any device I have ever gotten and here's how it looks in operation while this is the simplest configuration the amount of flexibility even in this design is enormous there are 21 separate gears that come with the cycloid drawing machine each one of them will have an impact on how this image develops additionally you can adjust the position of the pen back and forth up and down the location of the fulcrum up and down the location of the pivot point on this arm up and down with the result that you can control the image to a degree that no other machine can offer for example by changing this gear you can develop a very fine figure such as this and by controlling the position of the pen you can make nested images that change in character and diameter at your will with all of the gears and fittings supplied with the cycloid drawing machine you can make setups that are as simple as this or as complicated as this to understand just how flexible this drawing machine is consider the setup this is the second simplest design in the manual it produces five-point figures like this which to me looks like wrapping ribbon entwined together you can change the pen position length to be further or closer to the drive arm you can position its position along the drive arm back and forth you can reduce or increase the drive radius of the drive pin you can increase or decrease the radius of the fulcrum position all of which have profound effect on the shape and thickness of the arms after you've done all that then you can start changing the gears which will change the number of points in the design and their general shape and after you've done all that and you think you've mastered this one setup you can do one more thing you can take this off put the fulcrum over here switch it in for end and of course move with the pen over this way and everything changes now your images are going to start looking like this they still have five points but the fundamental nature of them is completely changed so then you get to go back all over and change all of the variables again and this is just one simple setup the more complicated setups could take weeks to fully appreciate the full range of the designs that they can produce this flexibility is the cycloid drawing machines greatest asset but it also creates its greatest challenge because if you just start throwing gears on the board you're going to get some great shapes but it's kind of like parachuting into the middle of an Amazonian jungle you may see some beautiful things but you don't know where you are or how to get back what I recommend doing is starting with the first example in the manual explore it and how you can manipulate the image move on the second to the third and so forth working your way through the manual to develop an understanding for how the machine works and how you can control the shape of the figures here's an example I changed one gear so that instead of a five-point figure I had a three-point figure I began by positioning the pen as far on the pen holder to the right as it would go and as far up as it would go and I got this figure then I moved the the pen holder towards the middle range of where it could be I got that and that one was all the way over as far to the left on the pen holder as a pen could go and still have a drawing state and they on the paper then it went back to this one and leaving the horizontal position on the pen holder unchanged I increased the distance of the pen from the pen holder so now the pen is moving down towards the middle of the table I got this and then again work my way across increasing the position of the pen on the pen holder right to left increase the length of the pen again and again work my way across this creates a three by three matrix and you can see how the images evolve as those two variables have changed and here's where this comes very useful let's say there's two shapes that you like but they're not quite right for example take this one this lobe is a little bit bigger than this one in here this lobe has increased greatly this one has decreased slightly and I began to think gee it'd be nice if I could set the pen so that the two lobes would be the same so I was able to do that with this matrix it told me that what I needed to do was position a pen holder about one-quarter of the way between these two and I got two lobes that were about the same and that is the advantage of taking a more leisurely approach to developing your figures and an understanding of the machine so that you can't just make figures but actually manipulate them to be what you want them to be let's take a closer look at how changing various parameters affects image shape for example this is the type of image you'll get if you put together the second set up in the manual if you reduce the radius of the drive pin it changes from this to this the size and shape are pretty much unchanged but the ribbon that makes up the figure has been compressed and with in the following three images the pen is being repositioned so that it oscillates closer to the center of the piece of paper this results in the image being twisted and compressed towards the center here are two more images showing the same principle the number of lobes a figure has is determined by dividing the number of teeth in the main gear by the largest common factor shared by the main gear and the drive gear in this case the main gear has 150 teeth the drive gear 100 teeth the largest common factor to both is 5050 divided into 150 gives three hence three lobes in this example the main gear was switched to one with a hundred and forty four teeth and the drive gear to one with a hundred and eight teeth their largest common factor is 36 which divides into a hundred and forty four four times so we get a four lobe figure here the main gear it has 120 teeth the drive gear 100 teeth the largest common factor is 20 which divided into 120 gives us 6 for 6 lobes while the machine can produce unbelievably complex figures don't ignore the simple spiral graph type of image they have a beauty all of their own here are far more interesting examples that barely hint at the capabilities of this fine machine for even more examples of what this machine can do use the YouTube keyword search string cycloid drawing machine I hope this brief overview is giving you an idea for the range of possibilities this cycloid drawing machine has now for my review I have purchased and built several different types of drawing machines I have studied many many others in my informed opinion this is the finest mechanical drawing machine I have ever seen or used nothing else comes close and it's not just because it has such a wide range of figure options because that's not the only thing that determines how fun how much enjoyment you get out of a drawing machine first is its convenience most drawing machines are quite large bulky and cumbersome they take a long time to put together and putting them together isn't often very much fun this thing even if you never draw a picture on it it's just fun to put together it's kind of like Legos or an erector set for grown-ups you just sit down you think of a design you put the pieces together it's not a kid's toy but it is just plain fun to put together another virtue and this should not be underrated is its store ability you saw the box it comes stored in at the beginning of this video that's a big feature I have a beautiful hormonal graph but the thing's a monster even folded up it takes a lot of room it's hard to store this goes on a shelf and it's there whenever you want to although it's such a good machine hopefully it won't stay on the Shelf very long I have also found it to be extremely reliable most drawing machines are very finicky sometimes they work sometimes they don't you set this thing up and it will grind away for hours without a problem so in conclusion my opinion is that you simply cannot do any better than mr. Joe Friedman's cycloid drawing machine thank you for watching this video and I wish everyone good drawing you

Channel: Wayne Schmidt

Views: 1,233,398

Keywords: drawing machine, joe freedman's drawing machine, cycloid drawing machines, joe freedman's cycloid drawing machine, world's best drawing machine, drawing machine review

Id: ygcGfnVM6Ho

Length: 14min 48sec (888 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 01 2015