I admit: a few years of prototyping without easy machine shop access really whets my tastebuds for turning metal chips. But all that time spent away from proper machine tools has also pushed me to re-imagine part catalogs, something I see almost every day. Without any precision metalworking tools handy, stock mechanical parts have become my supplement for complexity. And so a former dogma to machine-everything-thyself has been transformed into a hunt for that already-made-part-that-does-it-for-you.
But with part catalogs featuring tens of thousands of purpose-built parts, I started reimagining some of them for other misdeeds. And after a few years spent reinventing use cases for some of these parts, I’m about ready to tell you how to misuse them properly. So today I’d like to show you some of my favorite mechanical part B-sides, so to speak. These are ordinary parts in unorthodox places–something you surely won’t find in the datasheet! Now let’s have a look.
From Steel Balls and Pins to Kinematic Couplings
To warm things up, let’s start with kinematic couplings. Kinematic couplings are a mechanical design pattern that, when applied to two components, allows those components to connect and disconnect with extreme repeatability. This property comes from following the method of exact-constraint. By design, the two components are connected together with exactly one constraint per degree of freedom, no more, no less. The result is that, when connected together, coupled parts neither bind nor wiggle; they fit together one and only one way.
Kinematic couplings are often used in optical instrumentation setups where mirrors and lenses need to be finely adjusted without, of course, b ..
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