Removing Gears from Project Data Base

[John T]

I am involved in a kinetic sculpture and as such the visualiza tion of the "product" changes as the project evolves.  There are occasions when my design will have 3 or four layers of the same gear that overlays the previous one.  I can "hide" them easily enough but I would really like to eliminate them so that they don't come back to "haunt" me.

Once a gear is placed it appears to be fixed and permanent .  I can start the project over again but that is a pain.

[ArtF]

Hi:

   Unfortuna tely, you can remove a gear only if your  willing to remove all gears forward from that gear.
( Just right click the gear and select Remove Train. ). You can easily remove it if it was placed last..but it gets more complex if it
has several gears running off it..

   There are technical reasons for this limitatio n.. the program would get very confused if a gear in the train was lost, without all gears forward to it being lost as well.

Art

[Mooselake]

Nice picture, John!  The internal/external overlaid gear is pretty cool, too.

Changing a gear once it's placed is a real pain.  Art, would it be possible someday to do something like exploding a gear train - remove all the gears and place them across the top of the screen with no connectio n, say?  Then allow individua l disconnec ted gears to be deleted and use drag and drop to put the survivors back, adding new gears along the way.  "Will it mesh" might make this trickier, but it already allows incompati ble elliptica l gears (added a 5 tooth to a 21 tooth OK, but the pinion won't rotate onscreen) so it could just be "designer beware".  Way down on the priority list, of course.  Or is this too big a project? 

John, do you have any photos of finished projects you could post in show and tell?

Kirk

[ArtF]

Kirk:

 It sounds unbelieva bly complex.. but Ill keep it in back of mind..
Art