the brief
ENGI 210 is Rice's Engineering Design class. The assignment was open-ended: pick a story, build a wooden automaton that tells it through motion. Pick a mechanism, source the parts, fabricate the parts (laser cut, hand cut, glue, sand, stain), get it to work, and present.
The Sisyphus myth is the one where the gods sentence a man to push a boulder up a hill forever, and every time he gets near the top it rolls back down. Camus reads that story and concludes one must imagine Sisyphus happy: that the act of pushing the rock is the point, not the summit. The myth was the obvious story for an engineering design class.
the build
A hand crank on the side drives a chain of laser-cut plywood gears. The gears drive a cam, the cam moves the Sisyphus figure up the slope of the hill, and at the top of the cam stroke a release lets the figure slide back down to start over. Crank, climb, fall, crank, climb, fall.
Materials, from the bill of materials:
A vinyl lightning bolt on the rock represents Zeus cursing Sisyphus to his eternal torment, because subtlety was not really the assignment.
what went wrong
- The first design was too tame. Gate 1 review made it pretty clear we'd picked a mechanism that wasn't going to be interesting to anybody (least of all us). We pivoted into the gear train and the cam after Gate 1, which cost us most of a week.
- The laser cuts were incomplete on the first pass. Half the gears came out of the laser with the inner kerf still bridged. Reprinting "so many pieces" cost us a fabrication-lab slot we couldn't get back during crunch week.
- The gears were too tight. Even after the cuts came out clean, the gear stack barely turned. We sanded down the contact faces, lubricated, and re-tested several times before the crank actually moved freely.
- The glue rejected the stain. Wherever wood glue had wicked into the surface, the Red Mahogany wouldn't take. We sanded those areas back down to bare wood and re-stained. Twice.
the actual lesson
The thing this class teaches you, that I think you can only learn by doing, is that nothing works the first time you try it. Not the design, not the cuts, not the gears, not the stain. The class is an exercise in being okay with that. You design, you prototype, you iterate. The cycle keeps going. You start to enjoy the cycle, not the summit.
The Engineering Design minor at Rice is, in that sense, kind of perfectly named for the Sisyphus myth: countless hours designing, prototyping, and iterating, only for the thing to seize up the night before review. And then you fix it, and you crank the handle, and it moves, and you imagine yourself happy.
