The topic of this article will be making a wooden toy using a cam system. For those curious how a wooden toy is made, and for model-making enthusiasts, this wooden toy, which could entertain the little ones at home, will be an animated toy where a tiny mouse keeps circling in front of a cat, and the cat lunges to catch the mouse each time but never quite manages to.
The nice part is that we’ll produce these movements of the cat and mouse without using an electric motor, batteries, or anything like that, entirely through the simple motion of turning a crank.
Now let’s watch the video on this topic
Making a Wooden Toy – Cat & Mouse
In the cat & mouse toy that is the subject of our article, hinge points are used to give the cat’s arm-leg and tail a movable structure, a gear is used to redirect the circular motion, and a cam mechanism is used to produce the cat’s arm and tail movement.
The nice thing about this type of mechanism is that many different motions can be produced from a single source of motion (for example, turning a crank). In our example, when we turn the crank, this single motion produces three separate movements: the cat’s tail wags, the cat’s arm rises and falls, and the mouse rotates around an axis.
An Example of How a Cam Mechanism Works
The key thing here is actually the use of cams. If you look closely, the cat’s arm rises but doesn’t come back down at the same speed. It drops suddenly, almost as if lunging at the mouse. What could be causing this?
What makes this possible is hidden in the working logic of the cam. A sudden irregularity in the cam’s shape (an asymmetric sudden drop in diameter) causes the arm connected to the cam to suddenly drop down when it reaches that point.
So how is it that the cat misses the mouse every single time? Did this question occur to you as you watched the footage above? Where’s the secret to why the cat can never quite catch the mouse? Is it in the cam’s diameter? Is it related to the gear’s diameter? Or is it the mouse’s starting position? Feel free to share your thoughts on this in the comments.
How Is a Cam-Mechanism Wooden Toy Made
You can watch how a wooden toy is made using a cam mechanism and gear in the video below.
In the video below, you can watch the wooden toy being designed in SolidWorks. The parts of the wooden toy are drawn as solid models in SolidWorks and then assembled. It’s a shame the SolidWorks menus don’t come through very clearly in the video, but we thought it might still be useful, perhaps giving you some ideas for SolidWorks 3D modeling and assembly techniques, so we wanted to include it.
Cat-and-mouse wooden toy design in SolidWorks
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