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A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
From: David Pike
Date: 2021 Feb 26, 11:52 -0800
Just to repeat something I said briefly by email, that's really fun! A delightful little orrery!! I can't tell from the photo how big it is. What's the diameter across the outer circle? Did it come with any paint for the Sun, Earth, and Moon, or did you just find some convenient leftover paint to color it? It looks great as it is. With some wood stain on the gears, it would look almost antique. Almost --good enough for a movie prop of an antique orrery (as long as the motor stays hidden)! :) Frank Reed
Frank
It is 4 ¾ inches diameter (120mm). You get everything in the photo of the kit as it arrived. You only need to supply 2xAA batteries. Almost worn-out ones might be best. I put in two down to 1.49V, and it was still a bit fast. You don’t need glue, because it pushes together, and the tolerances are really close, but there’s nothing to stop you using a touch of glue if you prefer. I think the instructions say twist the wires together; I don’t read Chinese. I’m afraid that went against the grain with me. I soldered the joints and covered them with heat shrink sleeving. The orange paint was left over from a bridge building project I completed before CV19 with a class of 9 or 10 years olds at a school run by a former pupil of mine. I wanted to build the Humber Bridge from rolled up sheets of ‘The Times’ newspaper, but they insisted on The Golden Gate Bridge, because they were doing ‘The USA’ as part of the UK National Curriculum. Saints preserve me. I had to go out and buy a big tubes of orange, blue, black, and white acrylic artists paint. The green was from an old set of kids acrylic artist’s paints. DaveP