Make your own metal geared candle holder

When artist Benjamin Cowden first began making kinetic sculpture, coming up with gears that fit together was one of his major dilemmas. In response to this challenge, he developed an easy and relatively fast technique for making gears out of metal plate.

He uses this gear-making technique in the design of this elegant aluminum candleholder. The movement contains three of his handmade gears. The pinion on the left raises and lowers the two candle holding arms. Because he used gears of different size for the two arms, the candles move at different rates.

Here is some video of the machine in use:

This project first appeared within the pages of MAKE magazine Volume 21. Complete instructions and plans are now available for free online!

Here's the article on how to build your own metal geared candle holder

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