Mobius Roller
The Mobius Roller kinetic sculputre was inspired by an offhand comment to create a mobius-strip gear, but then transformed into something much more. This is a sculpture that perpetually applies torque to a solid mobius strip, thus causing the strip to move rotate in the direction of the torque. It uses gravity as the restoring force, and a set of six ball bearings to roll the mobius strip.
Simply plug it into a usb port and it will silently run for hours.
Before the mobius roller was constructed, I wanted to make sure that it would work at all. In order to save myself potential wasted construction time, I created an in-depth physical simulation in SOLIDWORKS in order to prove to myself that the concept was viable and that the bearings wouldn't bind. I found out from this that the mobius strip was stable, prefering non-binding configurations (you'll notice in the video that the strip wobbles, if it were to twist too far, the bearings would bind).
Exploded View
Finished Mobius Roller