Another project was an adapter to mount an i-phone to a spotter scope so you could take a picture through the eyepiece. The exhibit developer on that one is a lot of fun to work with because he hasn’t got any firm ideas about how he wants things made, and works well with the techs to design what he needs.
Also as an on-call tech I re-made some Delrin and plastic parts for the “Square Wheel” exhibit. This is an oldie-but-goodie that’s been on the floor for a while. Essentially a dumbbell shaped thing but with square flanges instead of disks. The track it rolls down is an inclined series of semicircular lumps, and the squares mesh well enough to roll down the track. Once in a while the kids smash up the Delrin axles and they drag out the old drawings and re-make them. It was actually these plans that inspired me to do the same thing for the flashlights.
As a full-timer I’ve made an adapter out of ABS that goes between a 14″ acrylic sphere and an off the shelf 4″ plumbing fitting. The sphere is filled with water and has marimo (aquatic moss that grow in cute fuzzy green ball shapes) in it. This all sits on a 6″ metal cylinder in the center of a bench made from Monkey Puzzle Pine. Another bench from the same tree has a colony of termites mounted in the center of it (but not able to eat the bench!)
The last project, nearly finished, was to mount an exhibit demonstrating how fast different shaped seeds fall. The developer had sort of slapped it up with threaded rod and self tapping screws and really wanted it re-worked. The rod went straight through the wooden railing of our balcony, and the seeds were in long Plexiglas tubes sticking out from the point of rotation. When 2 tubes are vertical you can see the seeds race each other to the bottom, a 180 degree turn puts the other two tubes up. I’ve made it prettier and more stable, but I’m trying to arrange a detent mechanism that stops the rotation at 180 degree turns. Otherwise, the kids like to try to turn it into an airplane propeller.