gearwork en · NOUN
Etymology
From gear + work.
Meanings
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(uncountable) A mechanical assembly of gears.
He shows it all off with a child’s delight, relishing the technical details of objects like automatons, the gearwork devices that were precursors to robots; a navigational sphere, a handheld planetarium projector used on Russian space missions to align the capsule visually; and a sextant used by the Antarctic explorer Ernest Shackleton.
2007 October 3, John Schwartz, “Texas Man Linked to Past and Future of Space Exploration by Sputnik and Soyuz”, in New York Times: