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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Wheel 24 in inner ring 60 inside wheel 135 in ring 180

Here’s a “wild” thing that Wild Gears can do: make designs with a wheel inside an off-center hole in a larger wheel going around inside a ring.

This picture shows little wheel 24 inside hole 60 which is in larger wheel 135 also going around inside ring 180.

This particular combination of wheels and rings gave a surprisingly few number of points, which I drew with several holes.

To see how this looks in action, watch Aaron Bleakley (Wild Gears’ inventor)’s video below, using Outer Ring size: 210, Outer Gear size: 126, Inner Ring Size: 64 and Inner Gear Size:35

Below the video, you’ll find a gallery of patterns that I’ve created with different combinations. They don’t all work well, so I’m only showing the better or more interesting ones.

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This video shows him making a pattern with parallel lines using his clever invention of different sized holes. He first draws the pattern with an extra large hole, then adds a donut-shaped circle to the hole to make a smaller hole and draws again. Voilà – a pattern running parallel to the first one – something you can’t do with Spirograph because the holes are all the same size. Then he adds a fatter donut with an even smaller hole and draws the pattern a third time. The result: three parallel lines!

Below the video are some designs I’ve made with parallel lines using Wild Gears.

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Here are some designs made with Wild Gears triangle 48 (78/18) in ring 84, exploring the patterns generated by choosing different lines of four holes.

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The post Wild Gears Gallery: Triangle 48 (78/18) appeared first on SpiroGraphicArt.

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I took the second last image above, made a series of rotated versions in Photoshop, then layered them into an animated GIF which I use as my YouTube logo. You may not see it rotate there, so here it is:

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