Steampunk Lumia- cool drive mechanism pulled from 1950's lab equipment

I've been toying around with Lumia builds recently and have been looking for a good drive motor. By blind luck I met someone who's in charge of maintenance and acquisition of all the lab equipment at a local university. In addition to this she is responsible to dispose of old equipment and she invited me to the university a few days ago to let me dig through some older equipment headed to the dump. Among a bunch of old centrifuges, heating pads, stirring devices, and other obsolete lab equipment I cam across a very plain looking old device that looked like a vertical motorized paper towel dispenser. It has a few cogs inside titled "Boston" but there are not any manufacturing markings elsewhere. It was clearly some sort of old recording device that turned some sort of drum where a marking device could record on this drum. I plugged it in and it worked! The base of the drum holder turned very slowly with a whirring sound. I noticed a little knob on the side that when turned to one of about five positions changed the speed of the spindle. Anywhere from about 1 rpm down to maybe 1/10th of an rpm. I grabbed it up. Today I opened it up and almost passed out when I saw the beautiful brass mechanism inside. It is the coolest looking clockwork style drive mechanism I could have ever imagined for building a steampunk Lumia. I've included a few pics of the device for your viewing pleasure. I plan to create a steampunk style Lumia with it using a few of Sinner's copperhead hosts mounted inside. It will be a while before it's done but for now I thought I would show off the drive mechanism.

Enjoy!

Another

One more

Again one more

Last one

Dang that does look cool. Cant wait to see it in action :beer:

Wow 5 times, that's the most I have ever seen
With the crowd here I'm surprised you still have you nads.

Dope. +rep

Whose a Lucky Boy! Very nice find indeed! +rep

Ive been looking for more of these devices on eBay and elsewhere. One of the cogs says "Boston" which IIRC was the name of an older company that made lab equipment. Finding similar vintage lab equipment may turn up more of these devices that are similar. One thing that does suck is the gearing is so slow on the final 2 gears that it turns imperceptibly slow. I plan on using glass plates that are about 12" square so the speed crossing the laser beam at that distance out will be faster than what it is at the spindle but I still don't think it will work well in either of those two gears. I may try to find some more brass cog wheels and do some additional gearing to increase the lower speeds and add some more aesthetic appeal. Haven't even gone to the drawing board with it yet but I envision a bunch of glass, chrome, copper, and brass for the working parts and body of the final device. Planning on doing three different colors in three different V5 Copperhead hosts all shining onto about the same point on the moving glass. I may even make some levers that push the buttons on the back of the hosts and make a single control panel that turns it on and off, changes the gears, and turns the three different lasers on or off separately. Need to sleep on it and see what comes to mind.

Cheers!

Looks like I have found another one of these. Possibly even more. Looks like I've definitely got another, just need to go get it. Since I don't need two right now I'm thinking about taking offers on the second one at the BST post. I made a post that's awaiting moderation now. Keep your eyes open for it if you're interested in one of these. Not going to discuss prices or the selling of it here other than this "redirect" post for which I'll add a link to later.

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Found two more. A little different than the first one but almost the same.

Those are really cool.

What are you making with them again, I don't know the term you used? (Assuming you don't mean hooker or fruit, etc...)

A Lumia laser projector. It's a very simple device that shines a stationary laser beam through a slowly rotating piece of textured glass. Just go over to YouTube and google "Lumia laser projector" and you'll see what they can do. Most are built with a clock motor that turns around 1 RPM or less. This has five speeds that I have estimated three. One is 4 RPM, then 1 RPM, then 1/4 RPM. I suspect the other two are 1/16 and 1/256 RPM. It's hard to say on the last two because they turn slower than I'm willing to wait and count.

Jmillerdoc said:

A Lumia laser projector. It's a very simple device that shines a stationary laser beam through a slowly rotating piece of textured glass. Just go over to YouTube and google "Lumia laser projector" and you'll see what they can do. Most are built with a clock motor that turns around 1 RPM or less. This has five speeds that I have estimated three. One is 4 RPM, then 1 RPM, then 1/4 RPM. I suspect the other two are 1/16 and 1/256 RPM. It's hard to say on the last two because they turn slower than I'm willing to wait and count.

Click to expand...

If you know the speed for one, couldn't you just count the teeth to see the ratios?

I did look, and, those are pretty cool devices....the effects are really interesting.