three great mechanism references

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Mechanisms are awesome, but they don’t seem to get much love in the search engine world. All told, these are the three best references I’ve seen that actually help in mechanism design.
  1. Flying Pigs Paper Animation has some nice flash of your standard mechanisms.
  2. Boston’s Museum of Science has a wall of mechanisms, so be sure to check it out when you’re in town.  In the meantime, PIE has some nice shots of some of their favorite mechanisms.
  3. For some heavy hitting mechanism knowledge, snatch up  Mechanisms and Mechanical Devices Sourcebook.  It is  the reference book for mechanisms, with literally thousands of examples.

The first two are good, but if you are serious about designing mechanisms, the sourcebook is a must-have. A colleague of mine let me borrow his copy for a brainstorm a while back, and it blew my mind.  Having the sourcebook in front of me in the brainstorm opened up a whole other dimension.

I mean, just imagine you are going into a brainstorm now.  You’re tasked to come up with some novel concept  of how to transfer this weird motion.  What do you throw out on the table?

You’ll probably start with the golden oldies: pin and hole, pin and slot, belts, chains, rack & pinion, spur gears, bevel gears. Maybe you fancy yourself clever and ponder planetary gears, 4-bar linkages, solenoids, clutches or geneva mechanisms.

Being as awesome as you are (you do read this blog after all) you can probably come up with some more… maybe a dozen more? A hundred more?

Did I mention MMDS has thousands of examples?

If you’re serious about mechanism design, it’s worth the $50.  If you just feel like nerding out on mechanisms, the websites will hold you over.

What about you?  Do you know of any other great websites or books for mechanisms?  I’d love to hear it.

Related posts:

  1. 507 Mechanical Movements PDF: another great mechanism resource
  2. best mechanism design library
  3. video: inverted peaucellier mechanism

Tagged as: mechanism design, mechanisms and mechanical devices sourcebook, references

Article by chris loughnane

Chris is Design Engineer + Sustainability Advocate at a Boston area design consultancy and has written 127 sweet posts for the Product Development Notebook.

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