These designs use gear #40 inside the #64 hole which is asymmetrically located in a bigger gear #126, and the whole is rotating inside ring #180. It gives a bilaterally symetrical pattern.

After drawing the pattern with a sequence of holes to create a ribbon-like effect (a common technique in many Spirograph/Wild Gears designs), I did the same in a different colour, starting at a point 90° away on the big ring #180.

I actually counted the teeth to find the exact spot, though I don’t show the counting in the video (180 teeth ÷ 4 = 45 teeth) and made a little mark with the pen.

I made a blooper in the second video, but decided to keep going, as I was working outside and was gradually losing my light. The direct sunlight you see in the first video had gone. A cricket started to sing as the afternoon waned and you can hear it in the second video.

These videos are real-time and all you hear is the sound of the pen and gears moving. Good for people who like relaxing videos and those who get off on ASMR (soft noises that create a pleasurable response).

I used cheap gel pens for these, the kind you can buy at a dollar store, although I got mine on Amazon when I was buying something else. There’s a link on this page to the ones I got; there are many other sets with even more pens – hundreds even. I don’t think brand name matters. They’re probably all made in China in the same factory or factories, and just given the label of the wholesaler. They work with Spirograph too, even the vintage sets (mostly) which have smaller holes.

Which colour combination do you like better? In the first, I used black for the first and last line of each ribbon, which outlines the shapes and reveals interesting patterns including a circle in the middle. In the second, I used the same colour throughout the whole ribbon.

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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.

Shop Wild Gears at this link.

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

Maybe you have to watch a video to get what I’m saying, so here is another one below.

I’ve written previously about this process, so check out my previous posts here and here.

In this video, the first pattern uses gear 45 in hole 60 in gear 135 inside ring 180. For the second pattern, I kept the same setup, and just changed the small gear to 32.

It’s a quiet video with no talking, just the sound of the felt pens and gears moving on the paper, made especially for those who get a pleasurable feeling when listening to quiet sounds (ASMR), and for those who love the relaxing effect of watching patterns unfold in pretty colors.

Shop Wild Gears at this link.

The post Wild Gears Video: Two Wheel-Within-a-Wheel Patterns appeared first on SpiroGraphicArt.