Mechanical and Machine Design

Group Assignment

1. I helped build a machine that prints the news on toilet paper.

This week was entirely a group project, where I worked with the rest of the Architecture section to design and build a machine. After discussing ideas, we settled on making a machine that would print the newspaper headline each day on a toilet paper roll. This fun idea turned out to be a huge amount of work, but in the end we learned a lot. The components of the machine can be seen in the architectural drawing we made (Fig. 1A). My work centered around the design, fabrication, and implementation of the roll attachment mechanism (#2).

We needed a way to secure the toilet paper roll to the machine so that it would not rotate on its own, but insted, only rotate from our rotary motor. We came up with several early concepts and 3D prints to create this mechanism (Fig. 1B).

In creating these prototypes, we saw an opportunity to make the mechanism simpler, removing the need for external components such as the spring in the slide-based mechanism. This simple push-based mechanism became the design for our Roll Holder (Fig. 1C).

As demonstrated, the Roll Holder mechanism operates simply with a push of the extended button, causing spiked platforms to push out radially to secure the roll in place (Fig. 1D).

Loading the roll is extremely simple (Fig. 1E).

Unloading the roll is just as simple (Fig. 1F)!

Once complete, we integrated the Roll Holder into the rest of the machine. It took several hours to integrate the rest of the parts to assemble the final machine, but the machine finally worked (Fig. 1G)!

This week was a lot of fun and required skills acquired in all of the previous weeks. Now, I am ready to focus on my final project!