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Hello Wild Gears Fans! I've got big news for everyone this fall! There are three new gear sets to discover and all the gear sets have received a major update. New Gear Sets!The Oval 2 Gear SetBy popular demand the world of oval gears has been expanded to include the Oval 2 gear set. This gear set includes soft oval shapes of many sizes. You can find the Oval 2 gear set at the shop listing.  Small Drops Gear SetThe Small Drops gear set is an exploration of a new collection of non-circular gear shapes. Drops feels like a good shape name but you could also think of them as eggs. And there is a second related shape which looks a little squished, like a clay ball was dropped on the floor. 
These drop gears are interesting and exciting to use because depending on which of the starting points you pick to work from the designs have different amounts of symmetry and distortions. This is similar to how a triangular gear makes a design that looks very different from one made by a circular gear.  It is hard to describe the way the designs are asymmetrical. Hopefully these pictures of doodles and drawings, provided by starstruckcanuck, will help. The drop shapes mean that one side of each lobe can be differently shaped than the other. Whereas triangular and square gears make unusually shaped lobes but with more inbuilt symmetry; which can be stretched and changed when using the fan of pen holes off the central axis. You can find the Small Drops gear set at the shop listing. Bespoke Enormous gear setThe Bespoke Enormous gear set is a new offering in custom gears. There are not many gears larger than 210ish. The core reason for this is that if I put a 260 gear, for example, on a large gear set it will dominate that frame and only significantly smaller gears can be added, like moons orbiting a planet, and picking one centerpiece gear for a gear set is tricky. I will start offering bespoke large gears in an easy to approach way. Also, I've got a limited supply of 40 cm x 60 cm acrylic sheets which means that I can fit two quite large gears (see picture below) into one gear set. I've made a google form to collect what I expect to be all the commonly needed details which will make the design process smooth and quick. With this offering you can pick two large gears, what pen holes you want in them, and if you want a gear cutout in each gear. If you want more cutouts there is a slightly more expensive option, this is because designing all the details of a gear is almost the same amount of work independents of size. There are about 30 pieces of large acrylic available for this Bespoke Enormous offering, once they are sold out I will be out of that size of material until I resupply sometime in early 2024. As custom sheets of large gears are finished they will be posted as options on the listing page too, for purchase or inspiration. You can find the Bespoke Enormous gear set at the shop listing.  Wild Gears UpdateWild Gears v4.1 is here!I've spent the last month updating Wild Gears gear sets. This update started with improving the numbering. Making all the pen hole numbers bold, for greatly improved legibility, and enlarging gear numbers and prime factors where possible. Almost all the changes have been to make the engrave better and easier to use. I can't say that there haven't been any other tweaks because as I'm working through the gear sets I'm fixing any little details that I find in need. There haven't been any big overhauls to anything that would change gear function; like pen hole positions or alignment or anything. This is an ongoing project, I've been working though the most popular gear sets to start with and I'm about half way through the whole catalog. Sometime in mid September I stopped shipping out any old 4.0 gear sets, so if you've recently purchased some Wild Gears, fear not, you've got the updated ones coming to you in the post. As I work though the remaining gear sets I will be updating the photos of the gear sets on the various listing pages. I am also picking the gear sets to update based on what orders have come in, so even if the picture isn't updated yet please make the order and be confident that you'll get a freshly updated 4.1 version of the gear set. I started the updating project with the Hoops gear set before I realized it was going to expand to be a total re-work of all the gear sets. As such the Hoops gear set is updated, but I did not update the design to say v4.1 instead of v4 and currently there is a nice stack of these updated gear sets; once that inventory is depleted I'll update the text to say 4.1 but just know that if you get a Hoops gear set it is updated too. The remaining inventory of v4.0 gear sets is available at half price on the Discounted Gears listing here. The gear sets on offer are:
There is only one or two of each item (or 3 of the 112 gear set) so act fast to avoid disappointment. Comparison between Enormous Hoops v4(left), and v4.1(right)The updated gear set photographs at time of writing are presented in this slideshow: No More Wood Gear SetsI have removed wood as a material choice for all gear sets. The option may one day return but for now the wood was getting a lot more expensive, but more importantly the storage needs and laser cutting preparations for wood are so different than acrylic and trying to keep this niche offering up to my quality standards was proving to be more trouble than I could justify. Wood boxes are still available. Winter Order DeadlinesAs the holiday season approaches the postal system will become busy making it slower and delays are likely. When everything is working smoothly a good rule of thumb for delivery time estimates is:
Future PricingThere are no immediate price changes in the works. In early 2024 I am planning on doing a deeper assessment to check that the prices of gear sets and bundles still make sense and I suspect there will be some adjustments then but I do not expect to do any broad strokes price increases in the coming months. Tiny Gear SetI used to include one tiny gear set for free with each package. I've changed my approach a bit, partially because it caused confusion in a few different ways. You can still get a free Tiny gear set with each order, you just need to add it to your cart. The first one should give an automatic discount that makes it free, and additional ones should be regular price. Please let me know if you have any questions about or issues with the free Tiny gear set. Thank-you for taking the time to read all this. If you have any comments or questions, or have found something that needs to be corrected, you can email me at [email protected]
Discontinued wood gear sets:
The Baltic Birch wooden gear sets will no longer be available for purchase. Wood crates and shipping protection materials will continue to be offered. This change has been made due to challenges in maintaining production quality with very low demand. Effective immediately (Aug 8 2023) all the wood gear sets have been removed from the wild gears shop. If you find any listing or references that need to be fixed, please let me know in the comments or at [email protected] Free Tiny Gear Sets: For quite some time each Wild Gears shipment has included one free Tiny gear set as an extra bonus. This has on occasion caused confusion, and I suspect in some cases let to people having more Tiny gear sets than desired. With each order placed the first Tiny gear set is free but you do need to add it to your shopping cart yourself. It should automatically mark itself down from CAD$3 to $0 in the checkout. If you desire more than one Tiny gear set the subsequent gear sets will be regularly priced. Please let me know if you have any issues with this new automated discount. Trying new things can be challenging and they don't always seem to have worked out immediately. I tried a new Wild Gears technique that I'm not quite sure what to call. It uses a stationary center gear, and then a hoop placed around the gear, and then a moving gear inside the hoop. It gave an odd organic result that has a little more space for variation and finesse that I was hoping for. But it is still and interesting little technique that makes designs unlike anything I've ever made before. Perhaps someone else will find inspiration from this experiment. There are two announcements and one reminder today.
1) Improved Shipping Rates: I have managed to secure better shipping rates though Canada Post! This is especially good for customers outside of North America. Shipping to Australia gets free shipping on orders of at least 3 large gear sets (two small gear sets count as one large gear set). As well as flat rates of CAD$25 for packages containing no large gear sets, and CAD$50 for any orders with large gear sets that don't qualify for free shipping. This is almost a 40% reduction in shipping rates to Australia. Shipping to Europe gets free shipping on orders of at least 3 large gear sets too. If you don't qualify for free shipping packages with no large gear sets are CAD$15 shipping and CAD$45 for orders with at least one large gear set. Shipping in Canada is free at two large gear sets or more. And below that it'll be CAD$10 for an order with no large gear sets and $20 for an order with a large gear set. Shipping to the USA gets free shipping on orders of at least 3 large gear sets too. If you don't qualify for free shipping packages with no large gear sets are CAD$12 shipping and CAD$19 for orders with at least one large gear set. If you are buying Wild Gears and don's see your destination listed here, you can still order through the Wild Gears shop and it will make you a shipping quote. If you are concerned about the quote, or are buying several gear sets and are wondering about free shipping to your destination please contact me directly at [email protected]. These are new shipping rates that I'm trying out so they might still change a bit, but this is where they are for now. I'm excited to be able to offer free shipping to more places and to be able to lower the shipping rates to most places. 2) Refer a Friend! I'm trying out something new. At the wild gears shop there is now a widget where you can get a referral code to share with other people. It will get them $20 off their order and will give you $20 off your next order once they use it. If you successfully refer a lot of people you can stack up your $20 discounts and get free gear sets. I've seen that some browsers automatically block the widget, so if you can't see the refer a friend tool try a different browser or look on your phone. If you have any problems, comments, or successes with this new program I'd like to hear about them. This is a new offering and I think the give $20 get $20 level will work out okay but if it turns out to be a bad idea I'll have to change the offer in some way, but even if I do change it I will honor any existing credits generated. Christmas Shipping Reminder! Get your orders in as soon as possible. Yes, it is technically possible to ship something within North America in under a week. But as the Christmas shipping rush ramps up the likelihood of system delays increases. There is still time to get your packages delivered before Christmas but act swiftly to avoid shipping woes. Thank-you for reading this update, Cheers, Aaron  This gear sets packs twelve pieces of extra long rack segments into it. Combined they are over 5 meters long and can make 2.5 m of parallel tracks. This gear set is excellent as part of a setup for large format composition like those done by Henry Lees  The Extra Long Linear Modular gear set is available in the Linear Modular gear set listing under the pull down menu
There are several exciting mid-year announcements:
Rack Hoops gear set An example of the triangle shape in the Rack Shapes gear set The Rack Shapes gear set (product listing here) is three pages of non-circular hoops, and some gears. There are nested hoop sets of triangles, squares, pentagons, and octagons all made with straight gear segments for the sides. These open up a bunch of interesting spaces to explore. The one I am currently diving into is using the rack segments to position and shift smaller hoops accurately and repeatably. The three pages of the gear set can be purchased individually, or as a bundle for a discount. Encyclopedic 2: 31-90 gear set Layout image of all three pages of the Encyclopedic 2: 31-90 gear set The Encyclopedic 2: 31-90 gear set (product listing here) is a continuation of the original Encyclopedic gear set. Its main focus is making each gear in the series have two identical sets of pen holes; one set aligned with the gear teeth and the other aligned with the gaps in the gear teeth. This is primarily needed if you are making a design that has elements in a ring and other elements around a gear; for proper alignment of the different elements some of them will need to be made with pen holes aligned with the gaps instead of the teeth. For example if you use a 24 gear in a 72 ring and make a design, then take out the 24 gear and put a 72 gear in the 72 ring and make the 72 gear stationary (with a magnet perhaps, or some putty) and remove the 72 ring then to continue the design with a 24 gear around the stationary 72 ring you'd need a 24 gear with pen holes aligned with the gaps in the gear teeth. These two sets of pen holes (tooth and gap) can also be used to make designs with 1/2 tooth step offset designs, which is otherwise not possible. This gear set has several options. It is available as a whole bundle of all three pages, as individual pages for smaller number ranges, or as one page of "No Primes" which has removed all the gears that are prime, or close to* prime from the gear set to fit the remaining ones on one page. *close to prime: all gears with only two prime factors and one of them being >13 were removed, some of the gears like that with a prime factor of 13 were removed too. For a full list of gears in the No Primes gear set see the product listing. Octuple Dense 112 gear Packing so many columns of pen holes into gears in the Encyclopedic 2 gear set inspired me to see if I could make an octuple dense gear. I think that for almost all uses this density of pen holes is overkill but there's only one way to find out. This gear has 112 teeth and 8 full columns (A-H) of small pen holes and 8 columns of medium pen holes fit into the gaps. 12 pen holes per column for the small pen holes and 5 pen holes per column for the medium pen holes. My plan is to include this gear (and diminutive frame) as a free gift with each order until August 20th (one month). After that I'll look at pricing making a listing for it; it'll probably be CAD$10 at that point. Shipping Update (Europe and UK)Shipping rates and options have been simplified:
All packages will be shipped with tracking numbers via air. I hope that this brings some more consistency to ordering Wild Gears into Europe. I know that the dynamic shipping rate calculator got some funny ideas sometimes. I continue to strive to provide the most reliable and least expensive shipping options to all Wild Gears fans world wide. Note that if you are buying several small gear sets in one order the shipping quote generator might get confused and ask for $45, if that happens please email me at [email protected] and I can help sort that out for you. Thank-you for taking the time to read this update. Please let me know if you have any questions. Cheers, Aaron Bleackley I'm really excited to make a bunch of art with these new gears and share it with everyone. But for now the listings are up and they will start shipping later this week.
Its the start of a new year and there are several pieces of news that you might be interested in:
1. Upcoming Price Changes
2. New Gear SetsThere are two new gear sets. The Square Hoops gear set and the Paisley gear set. The major theme of each gear set is complete but I plan to give two weeks (Jan 21) after this announcement (Jan 7) for discussion of design details and finalization of the designs before beginning production and shipping.  the Square Hoops gear set working design  Paisley gear set working design The Square Hoops gear setThe Square Hoops gear set is a collection of non-circular gears nested in each other. Points for final design development include adding pen hole fans where there is space on the 4 inner non-circular gears. Detailing on the four 60 tooth gears. Open for ideas on what would be interesting things to do with these 60 gears. There is also space for other small details to be added to this gear set. What small details would interest you? Often when designing a gear set I'll complete the main theme (big nested non-circular gears) and still have some space and cutting budget left on the design. There is where I'll try and add a complementary minor theme to the gear set. This time I'm hoping to solicit thoughts, suggestions, and requests to tap some options that might not have immediately occurred to me. My first thought for a minor theme is that there is some room in the corners of the frames for smallish gears to be cutout. I think that prime numbers are under represented in Wild Gears; they are not often present because they only make very dense designs. I think that very dense designs in non-circular rings look spectacular; they get all bendy and 3D looking in the corners. So this might be a good place for some small prime gears as a minor theme for the gear set. The Paisley gear setThere is a piece in the Strange Shapes 2 gear set that was the inspiration for the Paisley gear set. It was used to great effect by u/inksphere on reddit to make some stunning designs. Examples #1, #2, #3, #4, #5, #6, #7. I'm sure that there are many unexplored ways to put this asymmetrical type of shape to great use. Where to find and discuss these gear setsThe pre-order pages are posted here: To discuss these gear sets you have several options. You can:
4. Customer reviews and testimonialsThere is now a Reviews and Testimonials page for Wild Gears. If you would like to share your opinion/experience/feelings about Wild Gears please use the form on that page and it will be posted. At some point this might update to a fancier review widget but for now it is low-tech and simple. 4. Expanded shipping optionsLast fall I quietly added some lower cost shipping options for many destinations. The main one is "Small Packet International Air" or "International Air" depending of package weight. This is a less expensive option compared to a standard tracked packet shipment. There are two key differences though:
It is also possible to ship things to some destinations by boat for reduced shipping fees but the delivery window for that option is usually listed as 4-12 weeks and the above discussion about no tracking number applies here. Thank-you so much for taking the time and interest to read this news. I hope to be more active this year, making new videos, and sharing techniques. If you have any questions you can always reach out to me directly by email at [email protected]
Happy New Year, Aaron Bleackley |
AuthorAaron Bleackley, designer of Wild Gears Archives
January 2025
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