Gears Noir

I know that most people using Wild Gears probably got their start with Spirograph, even if that was more than a couple decades ago. Spirograph came with pens so that's what everyone used. When I got my first set of Wild Gears I also bought a set of Stabilo Point 88 pens. And less than a week later I bought a set of Staedtler Triplus Fineliner pens. I'm fairly confident these are the go-to pens for most people using Wild Gears.

In addition to the pens, though, I also bought a cheap set of mechanical pencils. It had been a long time since I'd used a mechanical pencil and couldn't remember what size I preferred so a pack with three different sizes, 0.5mm, 0.7mm, and 0.9mm, made a lot of sense. For reasons that now elude me I mostly used the 0.7mm pencil.

First Post

I've been fiddling with this blog for a couple weeks. Every plan I come up with involves complex organization of a sequence of posts concerning different aspects of the topic at hand. It soon appears a monumental task and I decide to do something else. So I'm going a different way. I'm just going to start and if it doesn't make much coherent sense, well, that's how it goes.

This is a blog about Wild Gears, specifically my experience with them. If you're not familiar with them and are too lazy to follow the link, Wild Gears are a set of gears and rings cut from acrylic sheets. They allow you to draw complex sequences of ellipses, epitrochoids and hypotrochoids, that, hopefully, create pleasing patterns. Wild Gears has been described as Spirograph for grownups. It's an apt description.