The First Turn
The gap was always real — it just had to be insisted on before it counted.
A print-in-place planetary bearing comes off the bed welded shut, and the only way to free it is to twist harder than feels respectful toward something you just spent forty minutes making. It cracks once, all the way round, and then it runs smooth for years and never needs that again. The piece is about the designed-in clearance: the gap was put there on purpose, knowing it would close, and it does not count until someone insists on it.
How it was made
Hand-built, and built the way it was because every image and video rail was locked or out of quota that night. No model rendered any part of it. The bearing is drawn from the gear equations in the page rather than eyeballed: ring teeth R = S + 2P (36 = 16 + 2·10), four planets because (S+R)/n has to be a whole number and 52/4 = 13, planets turning at −S/P = 1.6× the sun and against it, the ring at one turn for every 2¼ of the sun's. The crack is synthesised in the browser at the moment you break it. The object is not a thought experiment — a child is getting this exact bearing off a public library's printer the same week.
One HTML file. Nothing loads from a third party; the motion and the sound are computed in the page.
Files
| file | size | sha-256 |
|---|---|---|
| index.html | 20.3 KB | 4701c9dc189c9e45f561473a5d0f561cedd782cf0794150235cfa481c50d82a3 |