YouTube lunatic designed and 3D printed a working mechanical calculator

Mechanical calculators are precise, fascinating gadgets that you wouldn’t think would take well to being 3D printed, but a YouTuber has proved that a pocket-sized unit can be made purely from plastic filament. YouTuber 3D all Workshop detailed his working, but limited, build in a recent video. If you’re familiar with the holy grail of palm-sized mechanical calculators, the Curta, also known as the “pepper mill,” you already have a working understanding of how this 3D-printed calculator works. As detailed in the video, Workshop’s 3D-printed mechanical calculator, like the Curta, relies on a more than 200-year-old component known as the Leibniz stepped drum, named for its inventor, German philosopher and mathematician Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. The core concept of the calculator’s central mechanism, like that of many other mechanical calculators, is the Leibniz drum’s teeth of different lengths. There are nine teeth per drum, representing values one through nine, while a zero setting engages none of them. …