making a mouse-powered kaleidoscope
If you’ve ever walked past Artschmart, especially in the evening, you may have seen something unusual in the window. There are two white mice that work there, and at night they put on a light show. The mice are named Nibbles and Biscuit, and they have a special wheel that is connected through a series of gears to a kaleidoscope.
I made the original mouse machine a few years ago, and that one was a mouse-powered knitting machine. I was inspired by Arthur Ganson’s Machine With Concrete, which is geared down so much that the motor is spinning quickly but the final gear is cast in concrete.
“This machine was inspired by dreaming about gear ratios and implications of exponential powers. Each worm/worm gear pair reduces the speed of the motor by 1/50th. Since there are 12 pairs of gears, the final speed reduction is (1/50) to the 12th power! The implications are interesting. With the motor turning at around 200 revolutions per minute, it will take well over two trillion years before the final gear can make but one turn. Consequently, it is possible to do anything at all with the final gear... even embed it in concrete... and the machine will run just fine.” -Arthur Ganson
Arthur Ganson’s amazing machine is at the Exploratorium in San Francisco, if you would like to marvel at it in person. It could be there for the next two trillion years, spinning away!
My mouse machines only have a couple of pairs of gears, so the increased force is trivial compared to Arthurs, but it’s enough for a mouse to turn a kaleidoscope or a toy knitting mill to knit a scarf. For the mouse-powered knitting machine, it took my mouse six months to knit a scarf, and it was her life’s work. (I gave the finished scarf to my grandmother, who was 96 and living in a care facility at the time. When she told people her scarf was made by mice, I’m not sure they believed her)
For the new mouse machine, I wanted to make it spin a kaleidoscope. This is the machine in progress, with two sets of gears. It moves slowly enough, and has enough force, but I had to make a gear to spin the kaleidoscope.
To make the gears, I used Matthias Wandel’s gear template generator . His website, woodgears.ca, has a generator that makes a template you can print out with a regular printer, glue to a piece of plywood and use as a pattern to cut the gears out with a jigsaw or a bandsaw. It’s an amazing tool, and it’s free.
This is the finished machine, installed in the window at Artschmart. Nibbles and Biscuit are nocturnal, and they only work part time, but they put on a light show when they run on their wheel. The mice only work part-time, and they have a little sign on the door that says when they are in.
the mouse-powered kaleidoscope
