Fall 2023 News! New Gear Sets and Major Updates

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 Set

By 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 Set

The 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 shapes are one half of a circle, and the other half is three 60 degree arc segments.  In the egg shaped one the two side segments are larger than the half circle, and the central segment is from a smaller gear.  In the squashed shape the two side 60 degree segments are from a small circle and the central 60 degrees is from a large circle.

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 set

The 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.

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Wild Gears Update

Wild 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:

1. Strange Shapes 2 (p1 & p2)
2. Enormous gear set
3. The 120 gear set
4. Full & Plentiful Hoops gear set
5. Double Dense (p1 & p2)
6. Doubling Enormous
7. Modular Oblong
8. Mammoth
9. Rack Shapes (p1, p2, and p3)
10. Encyclopedic 2, p3 only
11. 180 adjunct with oval
12. Triangle Hoops gear set
13. The 112
14. Paisley extra gears (this is a 1/3 sheet with 98/49, 100/50/25, 120/60 gears)
15. Bonus Oval is an additional oval on about 1/4 sheet from the oval gear set.
16. Full Page (wood)
17. Compact gear set (wood)

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 Sets

I 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 Deadlines

As 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:

• North America, up to 7 business days
• Europe, up to 14 business days
• Everywhere else, up to 21 business days

note that these are generally over estimates of delivery time but they should give you the right ballpark feeling for how long to expect a delivery to take.  Postal delays due to volume aren't usually more than a few days but sometimes packages clearing customs can get held up for a couple of weeks if everything is very busy.  So if you know that you want some Wild Gears for a gift, please order them sooner than you think you'll need them.  I try and ship orders within 24 hours, but sometimes a big influx happens all at once and the cue gets backed up a few days.

Future Pricing

There 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 Set

I 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.

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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]