Open Antikythera

November Progress Update
6 days ago – Fri, Nov 15, 2024 at 10:14:25 AM

While we were hoping that kit shipment would already have started by now, we are getting much closer! We now anticipate Kit shipments will start in December and we may even have 2 Assembled and Tested FullMonty Open Antikythera to ship before Christmas. We are hoping that the Thanksgiving holiday will not delay our fulfillment.

Here is where we are today:

We have been very busy with our 100 Watt Laser cutting and inspecting each set of 62 Gears for each FullMonty Kit. Done.

All of the cardboard layers for the Kits packing have been cut by our 60 Watt Laser and glued into numbered trays. Done.

All of the 3D Printed parts have been printed and inventoried. Done.

Most of the Axles, Rods and Dowels are milled (approximately “only” 300 more to do), but we have not bagged (sealed) any of the FullMonty Axle Sets yet or any Bearings/Screws Sets to go into kits, except a prototype test. ToDo.

It doesn't look like our Kickstarter supported Rownd CNC Mill will arrive soon so we will end up doing every single Axles, Rods & Dowels by hand. Gosh!

Clear Acrylic plates (Front, Back, Mechanical) are now in full production. The Front and Back panels alone each take over 2 hours to Laser engrave/cut.

Assembly Instructions are not complete yet but are progressing. ToDo.

We were hoping we could finish our documentation before starting kit shipments, but some of you seem impatient, so we will do our best to deliver. ...but some components, like documentation may/will have to arrive later. #OnlySoManyHoursInADay

We are currently going through all CAD Drawings and spreadsheets to load the included USB Flash Drive to provide helpful documentation for your assembly process.

We are very grateful for the patience that most of our backers have and intend to deliver a product that everyone will be proud to own.

Till next month,

- James & Marc

October Progress Update
about 1 month ago – Wed, Oct 09, 2024 at 08:26:43 PM

We are happy to report that we now have a fully tweaked FullMonty prototype on hand with multiple improvements over the prior (FM) prototypes.

Our Focus right now is on Shipping first kits before the end of the month.
We will start slow to ensure our kits arrive at destination in good condition.

If you ordered a FullMonty kit, Backerkit will be sending you in the next few days a request for Address Confirmation. This will give you 3 days to change your address (if you moved) before Backerkit locks the address you provided.

We are sorry if this is your delivery person, but otherwise we believe your kit should arrive in good condition as we are designing our packing to protect and offer you the nearly 300 components organized into 7 efficient trays to work from.

Pictures of Trays
Follow this link to our YouTube channel to see the Open Antikythera FullMonty Kit Unboxing experience: 

STG FullMonty Kit Unboxing (youtube.com)

Continuous Improvements

James designed every single component in his favorite (Corel CAD) software, and I am particularly proud of how he solved the back needles.

The 2 needles need to follow a spiral groove for an 18- and 19-year cycle while working vertically pointing up or down with just the right amount of pressure to stay in the groove.

Picture of needles

We also decided to produce a set of Clear Sides to see how it would look, and we totally fell in love with the way it shows off all of our beautiful laser cut gears.
If you would prefer clear sides, just let me know via a Kickstarter message

Picture of Full Monty Clear Sides

James also improved the crank by making it a bit bigger and adding a spinning handle.

Picture of Full Monty Crank 

Till next update,
- James & Marc
 

September Update
about 2 months ago – Tue, Sep 24, 2024 at 11:37:52 AM

Hello again patient Kickstarter community,

We have made progress in the last month and a half towards building our next Open Antikythera Full Monty (Full Mechanism) Prototypes and have an offer for one of you. More on that later...

We, as before, have been busy manually milling more Axles, Rods and Dowels. The pre-made dowel replacement (set screws) we ordered have arrived and will work just as fine for those 2 specific gears. We also received the allen keys to drive them so every Full Monty kit will receive an allen key along with the 4 set screws you receive. This will save us a bunch of time and provide an as good or better product at the end. We are now way past the mid-point in our making of axels and have started focusing on the preparations for the assembly of the next prototype(s).
 

We just received an update from Rownd that they have just started shipping their CNC Lathe (YEAH!), but we have no idea when we will receive ours (Grrr).  And we have received (and installed) our Wazer Pro Waterjet. It is a fantastic tool! It has already created a few iterations of our Metonic and Saros needles for the back side. We still need to integrate the spiral pointer and are currently evaluating different techniques...

You already know about our extensive use of bearings to minimize friction, but at this point, we figure we should share another small secret: we generously apply a 1.0 mm spacer between every gear to prevent rubbing friction.

 

We made a lot of small improvements via repeated iterations for the Full Monty:

Our current priority is to run through each individual process(es) to make 1 Full Mechanism unit and see how close this Production Candidate (3rd generation prototype) can be to the final production article. If you are in a rush to obtain your assembled FullMonty or don't want to wait for the full production run, and are ready to accept receiving a prototype that may or may not be exactly identical to the production units, and will provide personal feedback to me, please Message us through Kickstarter and the first one of you who backed us for an assembled FullMonty to respond to this offer (US address only please) will receive (by the end of October) this prototype we are currently building. This has the added benefit for us to test our packing/shipping.

Some of you have asked for a delivery schedule. and we are very sorry we cannot provide a shipping schedule at this moment, but we are getting closer!

Till next update,
- James & Marc

Last July Update
4 months ago – Tue, Jul 30, 2024 at 08:03:24 PM

Hey there, Open Antikythera Kickstarter community, we still to this date haven’t received our Kickstarter backed Rownd CNC Mill yet, and despite our best efforts, we still haven’t found anybody to help us with this super precise and demanding task. So we (James & I) still have to manually make every single Axle, Rod and Dowel by hand using our Manual Mini Lathe, which is a super slooooow process, because it is very labor intensive, and that is what we are focusing on right now.  We are Open Source and can share with everyone who desires our specs for each Axle, Dowel and Rod.

To further compound the amount of labor, the total quantity of Axles, Rods and Dowels we would need for a FullMonty Antikythera device comes up to 1926, not the 1346 we originally estimated until July.

The good news is James has hopefully figured a way where we may be able to use tiny set screws (M3.5 x 7mm) instead of the 744 Double-Gear dowels we need while maintaining the same (or better) quality level. So we ordered 1000. If successful, this would save us from having to manually mill these 744 dowels. It certainly is worth the experiment.

So we have made at this moment a sub-total of: 474 out of the 1240 Axles, Rods and Dowels we will need to complete fulfillment and are continuing at (a slow) but steady pace.

Once this process is complete, the rest of the steps should be faster as our laser cutters are quick and all our 3D printers in our 3D print farm can operate without supervision.

Being Kickstarter (super) Backers ourselves, we certainly understand that you would all prefer receiving your FullMonty Antikythera assembled units or kits NOW, rather than reading about the amount of work it takes to get there… But there is a reason why no one else has ever offered commercially a complete working replica of the original Antikythera unit!

While this work is going on, James is also pondering on a spring loaded mechanism to keep the long (backside) needles to stay in their 18/19 year cycle spiral grooves.

Please understand that our UpFront (oratory section) is unique to us and quite cool by itself, but the full original Antikythera mechanism (implemented in our FullMonty) is about 2.5 times the complexity of our “truncated” UpFront.

Thank you for your patience, wonderful Kickstarter community. 

P.S. If any of you want to volunteer your help is assisting with the milling of these Axles and Rods, or the written documentation, please message us.

Thank You, 

- Marc & James

More mods for FullMonty Open Antikythera
5 months ago – Mon, Jul 01, 2024 at 06:51:03 PM

To further reduce friction and provide a better unit, we designed a support to hold the formerly unsupported end of the double gears axles. We are also redesigning the axle that holds the large pointers on the back (spirals).  So we had to source some bigger, heavier bearings.

On the left is the old axle and the new redesigned version is on the right side.

This week, we plan to continue manually milling the required 1346 brass axles, rods and dowels required to fulfill as our Kickstarter backed CNC Lathe (Rownd) has still not shown up yet.

Our god old manual mini lathe does a good job of making axles, but it sure is time intensive! We are praying for a ROWND CNC miracle!