Ever since I came across Jean Tinguely’s kinetic art forms on Pinterest, I had been meaning to build one. Something about moving objects keeps an audience engaged and I wanted to be the guy engaging them. I had no clue where to start, but this project I took up during the Inventuring week gave me direction and much needed motivation. I had very boldly proposed that we would have the children build an actual functional kinetic sculpture, but I had never built one before. 

Being an engineer, I had visualised the entire mechanism; but I never could have anticipated the challenges involved in building something with eighty odd moving components. I knew that I wanted to use a bicycle to drive the kinetic sculpture, but how and what needed to move was a total mystery. 

Week one went by in imagining, drawing rough sketches on paper, then preparing scaled models on a computer. Little work went into actual procurement of moving components. When I did settle on a design, I went back to the trusted gujari. I knew that I wanted the rotating components to move in opposite directions and at different speeds. I also knew that one straight forward way to accomplish this was to use gears. So, off I went purchasing different sized gears. The gujari however only has used components. This meant that I need to match different sized gears with different shaft diameters and needed to make shafts for all of them. 

I ran to the lathe operator and asked the guy for help. I got nothing but complaints on how complicated the task was and how it couldn't be done in under a week. I sought help from my father and using one of his contacts, managed to procure and produce fifteen identical shafts that would accommodate all the different sized gears in two days. This made life a little easy.

Heading back to my fabricator’s workshop, we built the frame that was to house these shafts and gears. We purchased bearings to make sure they rotate with minimal friction, since the entire lot was to run on a very long bicycle chain and finally was to be driven by kids peddling a bicycle. It took a lot of work and many sleepless nights to come up with a final design but we put it all together two days before the start of project week.

This was only a partial victory. We now needed to know how easy or hard to make it for the fifth graders. Since something like this hadn’t been done before, no one could help me with their experience. We just went with what we thought would work best, dismantled the entire assembly and prayed that it would be easy enough for the kids to put them all back. 

When we brought the frame to the school on day 1 and explained what the kids had to do, it wasn’t received too well. But Bindu and me had planned to keep them occupied over the first two days in prep work. So, we had deliberately left some components unfinished and asked the kids to make the fans and spirals look colourful. They painted their school’s core values on wood and fitted them onto rings that would be attached later to the shafts which were housed in bearings.

The kids were told which were the driver and which were the driven gears and were asked to count the teeth on the gear wheels to arrive at the gear ratios. They were asked to place the bearing housing onto the frame and bolt them in place. They then were told to fit all the second layer of components: the rings, the fans, etc to these driver and driven shafts. 

It was now the moment of truth. We attached the chain to all the diver gear shafts and pulled it with our hands. They all moved together pretty well. Day 4 saw the fully assembled kinetic sculpture erected on a wall 12 feet high. This meant that on day 5, the bicycle was fitted and for the first time we pedalled it and the sculpture actually moved. It had worked despite us never having tested it.