Description
We made these giant cipher gears following a request from an Escape Room in the UK. They came out so well that I thought they may be something others could find creative uses for.
Each gear is 15.5" in diameter. The material is layered, with top layer being a 1/4" thick fine maple veneer with MDF core. The back layer is 1/8" Baltic birch plywood that adds strength and rigidity.
The gears have 37 teeth. Each letter of the alphabet is contained along with 10 digits and a period or decimal point. Thus there is great flexibility in setting clues that may need letters, numbers, or both.
The gears are sold individually along with a center dowel core of about 3/4" that can be used to mount the wheels in your room. You would need to position and fix the dowels into a wall or table within your room. You will need at least 2 gears to make a funtional cipher. That being said, if you are creative it may be possible to use a single gear to provide clues if you combine it with some other object. Each gear you order will have a different orientation of letters and numbers, unless you want them to be exactly the same.
You can string 2 or 3 or even more wheels in any pattern where one wheel will turn the others.
There are many potential ways to use the wheels, but here is the most obvious perhaps: By setting one as the start wheel with a marker point on the wall; as that wheel turns the marker point could be aligned to a particular letter that you supply as a clue. The resulting letter or number on the other gear(s) could be the answer. A key word or phrase could be supplied that when dialed in one letter at a time, results in a secret message being revealed.
For a modest fee, we could also customize the text on the gear teeth. They could have any characters, vector artwork, or a language other than English. We could also add text or arwork to the spokes or body of the gear. Please contact us separately for this custom work.
If you want us to create a mounting backboard for each wheel, with the center dowel fixed into position we could provide that also, please contact me at dj51@aol.com
Level of Difficulty: Level 4