February, 3, 2023 or so

Let’s take a quick look at what Wild Gears can do. These were just experiments, no real plans were made and they aren’t documented at all.

This I called “Vanishing Point”. The idea was to use a big ring, which was probably the 192 tooth ring, and then select a set of gears that would give fewer and fewer points on smaller and smaller patterns, producing the effect of vanishing toward the center. I started each pattern with black to set it off clearly, an idea I got from somewhere on the Wild Gears site.

21s

I used the 210 tooth ring (Biggest you can use on letter size paper) and as you can see at the right, I used two different holes on the 160 point gear for the inner blue and green patterns, then probably the outer hole on the 80 tooth gear for the pink pattern, the 40 tooth gear for the outer blue and the small 20 tooth gear for the yellow pattern. The gears were picked so that all the patterns would have 21 points, hence the name.

35s

Using the 210 tooth ring again, a series of Gears was chosen that would produce 35 point patterns

Powers of Two

Not sure which ring was used, but a set of gears was picked to produce a 4 point pattern in green, 8 point in red, 16 point in orange and 32 points in pink

Two to the Sixth

This one goes from 2² points all the way to 2⁶ points.

Odds and Evens

Now for something completely different. This uses a crazy Gear in Gear in Ring approach. This was actually an accident. The red 8 point was supposed to be a 4 point and the title would have been “Chained Integers”. Since I’d already done the green 2 and orange 3 points, I went ahead and put the planned blue pattern down and came up the the “Odds & Evens”, which was a pretty good save 😉!

I drew all the patterns ahead of time (except the 8 point) to see what worked, so this one is fairly well documented. 

The 2 point green pattern is 96 - 48 - 24 - 11

The 3 point orange pattern is 120 - 80 - 24 - 11

The 8 point red pattern is 128 - 80 - 24 -11. It was supposed to be 128 - 96 - 40 - 11, but I forgot and reused the 80 tooth gear.

The 5 point blue pattern is 120 - 96 - 40 -11

Drawing a gear in gear in ring pattern.