At the heart of things that can mechanically transform, whether it’s Optimus Prime, a sofabed or a scissor lift, are linkages. With a cleverly-designed linkage, you can create cool things like Haefele’s Lemans corner cabinet pull-out:
Independent of Haefele’s invention, a company called Ten Fold Engineering has devised and patented a series of clever linkages with different names and provided animations demonstrating them. Let’s take a look and see what application you can imagine for each.
Next we’ll show you what the company’s been using these for.
http://www.core77.com/posts/67529/Ten-Nifty-Linkage-Designs