When to announce success?

[Fletcher]

Yes, I do Wheeler. I find building the easier part of the bargin. You measure twice, cut once & bolt it all together. OK, the technical challenge is at first daunting until you've tried a few builds, if you don't have previous handyman experience or watched your dad as a kid. After that, you've learnt a few skills you can apply to your next build. The basics are the same, you just get better at it, more accurate.

imo 99.9% of ideas have already been thought of, conceptualized if you will. Coming up with something innovative, off-the-wall yet feasible, probably way-counterintuitive, never-been-done-b4 & has a reasonable chance of actually working because you've analysed it as far as you can, has got to be far far harder than skinning your knuckles a few dozen times. Yet one cannot be without the other.

[winkle]

John

i am rather nosey can you tell me if the cog will be in the general area of where the red or green dot is on this wheel depending on witch direction you're wheel turns

if not would you give to much of the secret away to tell us where the cog might reside

[rlortie]

Fletcher and Wheeler.

Fletcher's above post is my kind of thinking! Conception is born through innovation which builds or disprove theory's.

When I build a wheel the mind is always in high gear! How can I do this easier for access maintainance and modification. This eventually will give birth to new ideas.

One thing it has taught me a long time ago.

"I Shall Never Pin" or attach any weight shifting mechanism in any way to my wheels!

Other basics are: Never concentrate ascending weights near the axle, this holds true even with weights that are ascending on the descending side of the wheel. Never use a shifter weights, as they always have to have reference to the wheel.

I have yet to build an actual deign that required ropes and pulley's as they two must have an attaching point. My current work does use magnets and springs, but neither in the way one would think!

Ralph

[John Collins]

Winkle - now 100 % certain that I have the concept; still working on the design but I've narrowed it down to two ways and I'm working on them.

Wheeler - I agree its definitely harder to put theory into practise. Although the theory might be easy to understand, finding a way to put it into a working model, is difficult but as Fletch says once you have the design in your head, actually building it is the easier part.

Winkle - can't help you, sorry. :-)

John Collins

[ken_behrendt]

I find conceptualizing far easier than building. With a sketch book, I can generate several possible designs, and then pick the one that catches my attention the most. I agree that a big problem with the "conceptualize first, build second" approach is coming up with designs one has not already tried and dismissed in the past.

Right now the closest I'm allowing myself to come to real builds is working with WM2D. Believe it or not, one is actually building something with a CAD program. Decisions have to be made about the size, shape, mass, location and orientation of parts. Parameters must be selected for various connector pieces between parts. These are the exact same kinds of decisions I would have to make if I was on my way to the hardware store to purchase the components for a real build.


Ralph advises:

"I Shall Never Pin" or attach any weight shifting mechanism in any way to my wheels!

I can only respond to this by reminding everyone that Bessler considered wheels using rolling spherical and cylindrical weights to be a dead end. I, of course, agree with that assessment. Unless a weight is "pinned" to the wheel, it will not be possible to use springs to temporarily store energy for weight restoration at critical positions during wheel rotation. I remain convinced that Bessler's wheels could not have functioned without the use of springs.


John wrote (on 9/4/06):

I don't think I said I had the solution; all I said was I understood the concept and why it worked.

and now proclaims:

...now 100 % certain that I have the concept

That is wonderful news! But, that, of course, is only half of the solution to the mystery. We must still have the mechanism (or most simple "general" mechanism) that will utilize the concept.


Right now, my own concept of Bessler's wheels basically consists of them relying solely on being overbalanced and chronically maintained in such a state in order to continuously run. I am not convinced that CF played an important role in the operation of the wheels and, in fact, was a negative factor that limited their rotational velocity and the maximum power output that could be achieved for a given set of design parameters.

John, you said that the designs you are working on do not use springs. That statement caught me be surprise since Bessler did state that he used springs inside of his wheels. In my present conceptualization of his inventions, I see the use of springs as critically necessary components in order to restore the descending side shifted weights back to their starting or "neutral" positions for their ascent on the rising half of a wheel.

I have had brief forays into the use of connections between neighboring and opposed mechanisms in the designs I have tried. I think, however, that these are an unnecessary complication.

Now, I have returned to my belief that each of his wheels contained a symmetrical collection of discrete, mechanically isolated shifting mechanisms that functioned independently of the other identical mechanisms within the drum. At any instant during the rotation of one of his wheels, each of its discrete mechanisms would be in a different orientation with respect to the Earth's gravity field and it was the continuous variation in the orientation of each mechanism during a complete wheel rotation that determined how it shifted its weights. The sum total of all of these constantly changing orientations, of course, would have been a CG for the weights that remained chronically displaced onto the wheel's descending side.

In any event, John, best of luck with your efforts to construct the mechanism that will prove the validity of the concept you have found in the Bessler literature. I am still confident that "the" solution will be known to us all before the end of this year!



ken

[Wheeler]

once you have the design in your head, actually building it is the easier part.

So John do you go from head to build?
Can you think of your design and build it without hours of design detail?

Anyone can order parts.
However if say you think up in your mind an air compressor. Try to make one!
If you can do this in less than 5 years, I say you are a darn good craftsmen.
Most people who think the concept must design and redesign several times, maybe thousands of times. Then they order raw materials or order parts already off the shelf.
Thinking is easy, and building what you think is easy on wm2d.
This is putting a picture of what you think in your mind onto paper.
I bet Ralph can think of how a pump works easier than he can rebuild one.
Theory is how all builds start.
The pyramids were calculated and not just people walking around putting big blocks all over Egypt.

[rlortie]

Ken,

For the sake of new comers and other forum members I reply!

"I Shall Never Pin" or attach any weight shifting mechanism in any way to my wheels!

I can only respond to this by reminding everyone that Bessler considered wheels using rolling spherical and cylindrical weights to be a dead end.

True, when weights on the ascending side are moved toward the axle it will not function, the is fairly common knowledge. I believe Bessler stated that he used levers and that one was enough for it to barely run! Also didn't Count Karl mention levers?

I, of course, agree with that assessment. Unless a weight is "pinned" to the wheel, it will not be possible to use springs to temporarily store energy for weight restoration at critical positions during wheel rotation. I remain convinced that Bessler's wheels could not have functioned without the use of springs.

And I agree to the assessment that if a weight is pinned to the wheel, that pin point is the physical load bearer. Whether it be by spring or pulley. Temporary storage of energy is useless if that storage is connected by pins equally spaced around a wheel. You may have moved the angle of a weight but you have not changed it's displacement.

Not unlike a foolish stunt I pulled two days ago, I built a two rod pendulum such as an upside down "V", Stupid me, did not realize that for what I wanted I was wasting my time. The transition from one pendulum only equalized with the other and did not give me the lateral force I wished to achieve. It worked much better to hang both bobs from one rod.

This I feel is what happens within your pinned designs.

Bessler said that he did use springs in one of his designs, but they were not used in the manner one would think.

Ralph

[John Collins]

Wheeler, I usually build from ideas in my head, with some brief crude sketches in between and during the build. I never order parts, but use what I have already in my workshop (garage), which is an accumulation of a variety of levers, weights, stiff-nuts etc.

No springs in my design, Ken, and as Ralph reminded us, Bessler said springs were used but not in the way people might think - and Ralph, Karl never mentioned levers; that was a piece poetic license from Frank Edwards' book about Bessler.

John Collins

[winkle]

John

i am thinking you're design uses leavers in a fashion not thought of by most people

a lever design that can give you that cog i spoke of before

[ken_behrendt]

John wrote:

No springs in my design, Ken, and as Ralph reminded us, Bessler said springs were used but not in the way people might think

I agree, but I think Bessler meant that he was not using springs as they might be used in the relatively new (for his time) mainspring driven clock movements. These were flat strip spiral springs that, once wound tight, could power a clock movement for several days. I think Bessler was sensitive to the whole issue of even mentioning spring usage and, even in MT, they hardly appear in any of the illustrated mechanisms. He was well aware that critics were dismissing his wheels as clever spiral spring driven clock movements housed inside of rotating drums.

Yet, he did claim that he used them and, obviously, he could not have been referring to spiral springs. That then only leaves a few alternatives. Either the springs he did use were flat flexing strips of hardened steel or they were the conventional helical springs that we usually think of when we hear the word "spring".

I remain convinced that his reference to "springs" was a reference to the use of helical springs. Such a spring has two ends and both must be fixed to something. In my conceptualization of his wheels' mechanism, one end of a spring was attached to the interior of the drum and the other end to a weighted lever. This seems to me to be the simplest possible use that I can imagine.


ken

[Michael]

I have another one of those strange questions for you John. Did Bessler ever go to or express an interest in Africa?

[John Collins]

Er....no! Why?

JC

[Michael]

What about that picture of the clock tower Stewart put up. Anything to do with a Doctor besides himself?

[John Collins]

The picture was of a carillon designed by Bessler. He intended that it would play tunes, hence Stewart's work on transferring the tunes notated in Bessler's documents to a modern sound system.

I don't understand the Doctor comment, can you enlarge on it? I cannot see the Africa connection either, but it's probably simple when you explain? :-)

JC

[rlortie]

JB Wheeler,

However if say you think up in your mind an air compressor. Try to make one!
If you can do this in less than 5 years, I say you are a darn good craftsmen.

I must be a very,very darn good Craftsmen, for I can take a piece of pipe, two end caps, two springs, two marbles and a couple of faucet seat gaskets and build a compressor in less than 45 minutes!

Ralph