Wild Gears’ creator, Aaron Bleackley, invented this cool feature. Most of the larger gears have different sizes of holes. Since the gears are laser cut from a sheet of acrylic, the “holes” fall out when you unwrap the gears. But some of the holes have holes. I call them donuts. They can be used to draw lines in parallel by placing them in a hole you just used and drawing again with the pen in the donut hole.

In this video, I use different colours for the parallel lines. See also this older post on parallel lines.

This video unfolds in real time without commentary, just the quiet sounds of pens, gears and paper.

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The post Wild Gears Video: Drawing Parallel Lines appeared first on SpiroGraphicArt.

Holes in a row with gear 48, with outline using gear 24, in 120 triangle.

A ring with 120 teeth gives a 5-pointed star with gear 48, and gear 24 gives a pentagonal pattern without any crossed lines. (See the math behind the number of points in a hypotrochoid.) These two gears can work well together, if you can find a 120 tooth ring.

Wild Gears goes one better than that; its Strange Shapes set provides a triangular 120-toothed ring which can give you rather eccentric 5-pointed designs, as Aaron Bleackley (creator of Wild Gears) demonstrates in the video below.

Further down, you’ll find a gallery of curious wonky designs I’ve made with these gears.

A 5-pointed star in a triangular frame can give a variety of shapes depending where on the triangle you start. Each has a different personality. If you imagine the 5-points are head, arms and legs, you can read a lot of expression into the designs. They’re a little lopsided, just like people.

If you move the wheel one tooth over between each design, as Aaron did in the video, you get a different effect than when you keep them lined up. See the captions for each picture below.

I’ve added color to them for yet more exuberance. You could make some cute Christmas stars with this set.

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