"Alien Orreries" - 11/04/2019 Pin Wheel Gears

I found the bevel gears used in the commission, to be very sensitive to positioning.  If the teeth were slightly too far apart, or close together, they didn't mesh and would jam.

Round this time I started subscribing to Automata Magazine, and decided to look into the simple kind of gears often used in wooden automata.
They have various names: pin, peg, lantern, cage, gear, wheel...
I have decided to call them "pin wheel gears".
A very old technology, and very versatile, they are often used on a large scale in mills, and a small scale in clocks.
This idea came at the perfect time, as this type of gear features heavily in Leonardo da Vinci's work, and there are currently exhibitions of his sketches up & down the country to mark 500 years since his death.
I visited the exhibitions in both Bristol & Birmingham, and bought a kit to make this model Leonardo's spiral helicopter concept.
I haven't had time to build it all yet, but I did put together the gears so I could use the dimensions to base my tiny gears on.
Pin wheel gear prototypes: