Anyone building the Orrery ?

Anyone else bothering to buy the weekly magazine Build Your Own Solar System ? At 18 issues @ 5.99 each, it works out at just over 100 quid, but you get to complete an electric-motor-powered working brass Orrery out of precision parts. I think it's reasonable value.

Had a night off bar billiards tonight, our match postponed till next Monday, so I had a go at putting the first four stages together. The last stage instruction said "fit the spindle containing the Sun and Mercury down into the part designated to hold Venus, and the gears should mesh". "Oh yeah", I thought - but they did !

The magazines will provide some material for a quiz, no doubt, and if all goes well, I will finish with a nice piece of kit ! 8-)

[DA-DM]

sorry no, i do the news & mags at work though. part 4 came in today, weekly issues so part 18 will be 9th july. built by tommo by the 10th ?? ;D

[fazza]

Have do you find the time to get involved with so many wonderful pastimes? You have my admiration. But how will this ever look like Kylie's backside?

[Colemanator]

fazza said:

Have do you find the time to get involved with so many wonderful pastimes?

For that answer read at the bottom of Clives posts 8-)

Just to confirm I'm remaining up to speed, and put together stages 5-7 this afternoon: an extra arm with Venus on it has been added, as well as an outer disc mechanism which will enable the moon to orbit Earth.

Saturn when it comes will be supplied with its rings, and some of the outer planets will even have their own moons orbiting.

No embarrassing bits left over, and no bits lost down the settee ::) - touch wood, so far so good. 8-)

[fazza]

I heard that this Orrery was going to be advertised more on TV.

With Jonathan Ross heading the cast. That'll be fun

Just assembled stages 8 to 11. I now have a hand-painted Earth moving round in orbit with Mercury and Venus. The Earth actually rotates as it's going round, too !

Had a slight mishap with the moon, though, it was very lightly soldered to its arm and snapped as I tried to press it in place. A drop of superglue should be sufficient for the purpose.

[DA-DM]

did it create moondust when it snapped ?... ;D

Well I managed to get the moon arm repaired at work in the 'clean room': The guy did an excellent job drilling it out (spent about half an hour on it) and it's now solid as a rock.

I have now completed the next stage (which is Mars and its two moons) but reckon I'm only about half-way through completion, which means that by the finish I will have collected around 30 magazines. >:(

[fazza]

Cheap!

[DA-DM]

Jun 29, 2008 13:32:58 GMT tommo III said:

I'm only about half-way through completion, which means that by the finish I will have collected around 30 magazines. >:(

i thought it was 18 issues....... ??? still, you can then read all about your 'piece of kit'....... ;D :-*

Four more issues have taken me up to 20, and I calculate I'm about half-way through: have just fitted the asteroid belt, and I've still Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune and Pluto to go.

So, expensive, yes, but as DA points out, I'm getting the magazines and am building up a plethora of material for some future quizzes on Astronomy. ;D

[fazza]

Just what we want: a plethora

[Colemanator]

Clive,

can you put a photo on here as to what it looks like?

As requested:



And the picture shows just about as far as I've got, with Jupiter and its moons promised with the next issue.

It has been instructive for me so far for two reasons:

1) It provides an insight into watch and clockmaking, time being regulated by gearsets of varying sizes and with differing numbers of teeth working with and against each other;

2) The template demonstrates how astronomers managed to predict alignments, conjunctions and eclipses so accurately, using simple mathematical calculations.

These will be selling on eBay for upwards of £300 by the year end, but there's nothing to match the excitement of building your own ! 8-)

[fazza]

I saw something like this in Anne Summers last week!

Just fitted Jupiter and its four moons: six planet arms now in place and five to go. Jupiter is impressive, handpainted, and you can make out its red spot. Reckon it'll be January before the whole thing is completed.

Having a beer now and settling down to watch Match of the Day.

Saturn now fitted complete with rings and its three main moons (Titan, Rhea and Iapetus). Plus sturdier 'legs' as the more you add the more the danger of it toppling over !

Had a nasty moment when thought I had lost a grub screw (twenty minutes spent scrabbling around on hands and knees on the carpet) but then found that I had fitted it earlier and forgotten...........senior moment ! ::)

Okay, Uranus and Neptune have both been fitted, but I've started to hit problems, one minor and one major.

The minor one is a repeat of the one I had with the Moon, which is that Neptunes moon had minimal soldering to its tiny moon arm and came off almost straight away. So that's another drilling job for Nick on our shop floor.

The major one I reckon is a flaw in the design, which is that Saturn with its rings and its three main moons appears too heavy for its gear arm, and the extra tightening needed has damaged the inside thread of the gear collar.

So I have a choice of whether to send away for a replacement gear collar - or to take it to our model shop for them to repair the thread with a helicoil insert.

Gradually nearing completion, though.

Well I've had a bit of free time on my hands recently, so today I picked the job up again (it had been resting forlornly on the corner of the sideboard, with Saturn on the deck).

My shopfloor guy had repaired Neptune's moon for me (and he had even put the arm on the right way round, whereas I had been dreading that he hadn't !) - so my only problem involved Saturn - plus that fact that I had fallen behind with two stages of assembly.

Having had a think about the gear collar, I decided I would try a replacement grubscrew instead, and it did the trick. I resolved to use the 'duff' one on the Pluto support arm as there was less weight to carry, and I seem to have got away with it......

So Saturn re-fitted, Neptune installed, Pluto sub-stage fitted, and Eris (newly-discovered planet outside the orbit of Pluto) also fitted.

I'm now down to the last 4 issues of 52 ::) ::) of the magazine, which provide the gearbox, motor, transformer, wiring, housing and stronger replacement legs.

It will have cost me £300 by the time I've finished, but I saw one change hands on eBay a couple of weeks ago for a grand ! 8-)

Feb 24, 2009 17:36:06 GMT tommo III said:

I'm now down to the last 4 issues of 52 ::) ::) of the magazine, which provide the gearbox, motor, transformer, wiring, housing and stronger replacement legs.

Nearly there now............
Had a good day today: Baseplate and new legs fitted; power speed controller fitted; spindle knob added; power inlet socket fitted; on/off reversing switch fitted; base unit casing fitted; noise-proofing foam inserted over the PSC; gear box fitted with protective rubber pad underneath; wires from switch connected to wires from motor/gearbox; innards (motor, gearbox etc) tucked in and secured inside casing; gear assemblies with planets slotted into and secured into base unit; drive shaft aligned into motor socket and unit tightened.

The final issue of the magazine next week will provide the AC power adapter which when simply plugged in will make the whole thing work (in theory). 8-)

It's all plugged in now and working.
It did lock up after about 1 minute, but they'd anticipated that: in the final issue, along with the power supply, a replacement cog wheel for the moon going round the Earth was provided (as the original was too tight a fit.)
The outer planets hardly seem to move at all, but Jupiter moves deceptively quickly, completing a circuit in about five minutes.
It's taken exactly a year to build and I'm quite pleased with the results.

[Julian Dale]

Have you any more pictures, or even a video?

Here is the website which tells you everything about it:

www.build-solar-system.com/solar_system.html#

There are three separate Youtubes for the assembly stages (Click on Phase 1, Phase 2, Phase 3).


A follow-up magazine set is about to start, called "Build a model Earth Moon and Sun Orbiter" aka "Tellurion" with the parts given out with each issue. (This of course being instructive as to how phases of the moon and lunar and solar eclipses are caused.)

It looks a smart bit of kit and uses the same technology, but I can't really justify forking out for that one as well, especially as I thought the Orrery would cost no more than £100 and it finished up costing three times that!