Posted by Smithy (203.38.223.82) on September 03, 2002 at 18:09:42:
G'day all,
Good to see we are back on line again, not sure what happened but I have been waiting to let everybody know that my small COSTA wheel now has four mechanisms attached (just for you Grim!) and I have done some rudimentry balancing and alignment in order to eliminate any losses due to friction/imbalance etc.
As a result the only friction doing any damage is the acuation of the lower lever to lift the mass closer to the axle, I will probably have to lengthen this lever in order to reduce the effort required but this may have a detrimental effect????. We will have to wait and see, appart from that it looks pretty promising,
with manual acuation of the levers the unit rotates relatively slowly at about 40-45 rpm, it's only just able to turn itself which answers the question as to why Costa's wheel was so large!! With a ratio of the huge proportions of his wheel I'm not surprised it was so big!! Anyway I will post further updates as they become available, I don't believe the Costa wheel
is capable of doing any real "usefull" work apart from showing that OU is possible, any resistance applied to the wheel itself will result in it stopping, however, it seems to be self starting, but only if the lowest lever is actuated first!!
Regards to all, Smithy.