Pulley Tool: Adding Pulleys and Gears to your Object

Photo of Rod Ross

Instructor Rod Ross

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  • Duration: 13:08
  • Views: 2849
  • Made with Release: 16
  • Works with Release: 16 and greater

In this tutorial, learn how to add pulleys and gears to a lathe using the Pulley Tool Preset.

In this tutorial we will use the Pulley Tool in conjunction with the Gear Tool and animate pulleys and gears on a lathe.

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Transcript

- In this tutorial, I'll show you how to add pulleys and gears to a lathe like in this animation. The first thing I'll do is click on Controls and turn off Instructions. Then I'll select the pulley tool and copy it. I will go to Window and go to my lathe file, and I'll paste it in. Now I'll rotate the pulley tool 180 degrees, and drag it over. I'll go to my Controls, and I'll turn on Electric Motor and turn off Driven Pulley. Now I'll go to my four views, and go to my front view. I'll select the pulley tool and drag it up, and drag it over to the stand. Now so that we can see better, I'll turn off this lathe and the parts in the viewport. Now I want to line up this null with this shaft so I'll go to my Controls, and I'll go to Rotate driven pulley, and I'll rotate this around and get it close. Then I'll go to Driven pulley distance, and bring that up a little bit, and I'll zoom in. Then I'll go to Fine tune rotation and drag this, and go over a further on the distance. I better make that 9.5, or maybe 9.4. Now zoom back out. Then I'll go to my perspective view, and I'll turn on the parts on shaft one. Then I'll click on the pulley tool, and align the belt with this pulley on the end. Now I'll go to my Controls and go to Driven pulley radius, and I'll turn that down. Now that's good, and I need to move that over just a little bit. Okay, that's good. Now this belt doesn't match up with this pulley so I'll go to Show pulley and belt splines. I'll zoom out a little. So I'll select the splines, and go to point mode. Then I'll select these, and I'll drag these up, and scale them out a little. Make it almost even. Then I'll select all these points, and scale that in a little bit, and I move that over just a little. That's good. Now I'll go to my Controls, and I'll uncheck Show pulley and belt splines. I'll click on the pulley tool and copy it, Alt down Control and drag it up. Now I'll go to tools, arrange objects, and I'll open this panel, and I'll drag it over and dock it to this panel, because we will be using it later. Now I'll go to Transfer, and I'll align the pulley tool to this shaft. I'll go to my Controls and I'll turnoff Electric motor and Driven pulley. Now I'll select the pulley tool, click on Move and rotate this around. I'll align it to this first pulley. That looks good. Now I'll go to my front view. I'll go to Controls, and I want to align this null with this shaft here, so I'll go to Rotate driven pulley, and I'll bring this around, and I'll zoom in. I'll go to Driven pulley distance, and move this up a little. I'll make this 3.23, and I'll move this up to 13.5, maybe 13.6. This takes a little trial and error sometimes. You need to get it pretty close so that your shaft doesn't wobble. Okay, so that looks good enough though, and I'll drag that out, and I'll go to my perspective view. Then I'll go to shaft three, and turn on these parts. And I'll zoom in on this, and that looks good already. Now I want these shafts to rotate with these pulleys, so I'll go to my first pulley tool. I'll open up the Parts null and go to the Connect nulls. Now I'll go down to shaft one, and I'm going to drag that, and make it a child of the driven pulley. Now I'll close this, and I'll go to my second pulley. I'll open up the Parts null, and the Connect nulls, and I'll select shaft three, and I'll drag that, and make it a child of the driven pulley. Now if I go back to frame zero, and hit Play, you can see that these pulleys are turning those shafts. Another thing we want to do is connect the second pulley with the first one so I'll go to my controls for the second pulley. I'll close up these parts. Then I'll go to my first pulley, go to the Connect nulls, and I'll drag in Driven pulley into my Connect object, and then I'll click on Connect, and now the second pulley is connected to the first pulley. Okay. All that's running together. Next thing I'll do is go to Window, and go to the gear tool that I have open already. I'll go to Controls and uncheck Instructions. Then I'll select gear tool and copy it. And I'll go back to my lathe file, and I'll paste it in, and I'll rotate that 180 degrees. And I'll go to transfer and I'll align it with the shaft. I'll grab my move tool and pull that out. Now I'll go to the Gear Tool Controls. I'll go to Gear Type, and I'll change this to Multiple, and I'll close this 2 Gear Controls, and I'll turnoff Gear 5. Okay. Now I'll zoom out. I've got a model mode. I'll select this gear. Got it transfer, and align it to this shaft. Then I'll move that out. Then I'll select this gear, got to transfer, align it to the shaft. I'll move that out. Same with this gear, but I'll align it to this one. Now I'll select all four of these blue torus. I'll go to basic and hit enabled. Then I'll go to Object, and I'll change this to 120. I'll go to this gear. I'll select the purple torus. I'll go to Teeth, and I'll change that to 17. Then I'll click on this purple torus. I'll change the teeth on this one to 58. I'll go back to this gear, and on Inlay, I'm going to change that to None. Then I'll go to Teeth, and I'll change the Orientation to line up with this gear. Then I'll go to this gear. I'll go to Teeth and change that to 25. Then I'll change the orientation. Then I'll go to this gear. Then I'll change the teeth to 59, and change the orientation. Now I'll go to the Controls for the gear tool, and I'll go to the second pulley tool. I'll go to the Connect nulls, and I'll drag in the driven pulley into the Connect object, and click on Connect. Now I'll hit play. Now notice that this gear is going in the wrong direction. So I'll go to my Controls and I'll turn on annotation. That's Gear 4. So I'll go down to Gear 4 and uncheck Reverse, and that's going correct, but Gear 3 needs to be reversed. Now they're all working correctly. Okay, now I'll go to my Controls, and I'll turnoff annotation. I'll make a copy of this gear tool. I'll go to my Controls on that one, and I'll turnoff Gear 4 and Gear 3. I'll click on Gear Tool, and I'll drag this back, and bring it right alongside this pulley. Okay, now I can close these. Now I'll turn on the lathe. And now everything's running together and working correctly. Okay, that's it for this tutorial.
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