Posted by Joe Courage (198.91.33.104) on January 30, 2002 at 17:51:32:
This description should be sufficient to provide an understanding as to how Bessler's basic design works. At least it's my very best guess as to how it had to have worked. Once his basic underlying principle is understood, all sorts of people can easily come up with all sorts of different finishing touches to it, such as how the weights are clasped at the moment that they produce the force which is used to turn the spindle. His basic design of flying weights connected by levers at right angles to the spindle (which we would call the drive shaft in today's scheme of things) and twirling around it, is evident and remains unchanged throughout the description.
I have been working on this for quite a while, so it is high time to show you how it works. The challenge was how to keep a spindle rotating by somehow utilizing the power of gravity, using some of the hints that leaked out. I have purposely put redundancy into it for the sake of clarity and to make it as simple to understand as possible, since authors are notorious for making assumptions about readers' abilities to follow their train of thought.
This method is not particularly exciting-looking, mechanically speaking, just a simple straight-forward arrangement of levers, the way it was described in his day, with weights on their outer ends. I feel that most of it has to be very close to the gist of his design, although not 100% identical to it.
The benefits of a gravity-fed engine are clearly of such a high order of magnitude for mankind that it appears to be a very precious and priceless gift to all of us from the Lord, to whom it is humbly and gratefully dedicated.
This idea is freely given to one and all.
Gravity-recycling machines will take away air pollution and a host of other environmental issues such as spent nuclear rods. Many lives will be saved as vehicles and buildings no longer turn into firetraps due to gas leak emergencies of one kind or another.
Some time ago I wondered how much power a mechanism like this could produce, so I built a quick and dirty version with only four levers in it and without what I call a pickup cage to keep it going, just to satisfy my curiosity as to what would happen and what kind of oomph it might have, if any. It was intended for only one go-round of the drive shaft.
I was not prepared for what happened next.
Steel hinges, vital to the machine's operation and very firmly bolted into place, were crisply snapped in two, sideways, mind you, the way you pop toilet tissue apart. Amazing! The contraption had demonstrated an absolutely incredible amount of clout. The next version will need to have its parts beefed up to industrial strength, be complete and include more groups of levers in the method described below whiich eliminates the wrenching force of the 90-degree jolts which this one had.
The event in the above paragraph is what gave me the confidence to stick my neck out and say that it will work.
Incidentally, this "gravity-recycling" engine does not conflict in any way with the third law of thermodynamics, which states that you cannot completely eliminate friction. This is certainly true; you will find no shortage of friction here. It might be worth mentioning a law of physics which has been around for a much longer time, known as the principle of the lever. You get far more energy out of a levered transaction than you put into it. The many levers built into a gravity machine in a neat, orderly arrangement continually make the drive shaft go around, and the energy that comes out of the machine is many times more than what goes into it to start it moving, which is practically nothing. The three basic ingredients involved are levers, weights and gravity.
Its steel version is much more versatile than wood, easier to plan and put together and even change your mind with. It looks somewhat different from the wood version but the basic principles are the same. The explanation below talks about wood rather than steel in order to help make it easier to understand the general principles faster everything goes and the more exponentially powerful its output is. There is also more power with longer levers but everything had better be made sturdily or else its raw power will definitely tear it apart. If we use four groups of four levers (16 altogether), multiplying by 24 rpm's equals 384 strokes against the drive shaft each minute. Thus each stroke, while powerful enough to do its job, is also exactly brief enough.
In order to help help make clear how everything works together for the benefit of those of us who may be slow to catch on, let's start our gravity engine from a complete standstill and accompany one of the levers in a sort of a fantasy journey to see what happens as it embarks on its trip.
We will slowly push the pickup cage and it will gently nudge forward whichever lever happens to be nearest to the top of the circle, with its bottom resting on the drive shaft at its hinge connection. Then gravity begins to show itself as the lever moves into the first few degrees beyond the top. It will then part company from the restraint of the pickup cage and start moving forward like a little bird making its first flight, giving in more and more to the increasing tug of gravity. It begins to make a curved swan dive through the air, accelerating exponentially as it plunges into a free fall, turning on the bearings of its hinge.
It is really flying now on a wild gravity ride like a Coney Island roller coaster and is about to wallop the drive shaft with a mighty force. Its hinged connection with the drive shaft, which was open during its dive, is now closing again and the lever is about to come in contact with the drive shaft which it then slams with all its might. The heavier the weight block, the more clout the lever will pack to keep the drive shaft rotating, so I emphasize again the importance of using components made of high quality heavy duty material.
Despite the powerful force of the impact, our drive shaft is not hurt. Except when starting from a standstill, the machine is moving around about two dozen turns a minute, so the lever hits a "moving target," so to speak, and the impact lasts for only an instant. The pickup cage's transverse bar is engaged by the pawl, which catches the lever and prevents it from falling backward and takes it up to the top of the circle, where the cycle starts over again.
This upward action of the cage does not take away much energy from the machine due to the lever's position on the circle being only a relatively short distance from the top and also because while the lever is on its way up, its weight being carried by the pickup cage is rapidly diminishing while at the same time more and more of its weight is shifting over to the drive shaft, which supports it.
Among other things, Bessler's bright idea lies in his unusual offset drive shaft design, but first let's see how a basic group of four levers works and then go from there. In normal practice, you would always use more than one group for the sake of smoothness.
Let's start by making a drive shaft using a 4-inch by 4-inch by 3-foot beam. Make the levers two inches by three inches and two feet long. The exact lengths are not all that important, but the widths are. If two by threes are not available, cut them down from two by fours. The weights at the outer ends of each lever would be no more than about two pounds. Of course, you can make the components of a gravity machine much larger or much tinier.
Each end of the drive shaft gets rounded ("turned") by a wood lathe into the shape of an extra-wide peg several inches long so that they can be passed through a steel bearing at each end which holds up the draft shaft by the pegs. One of these ends is connected to a transmission which turns the generator. The transmission (gear) speeds up the rpm's coming from the drive shaft so that the generator can produce electricity at the correct rpm speed.
Don't panic if the transmission and generator sound intimidating. You can make a perfectly good "wheel" without them. The po cage surrounds the wheel for the length of its drive shaft and is held together by the transverse bars which are fastened to two round pieces of plywood, one at each end. The plywood pieces have a square hole in their centers through which the drive shaft is placed. The cage is thus positioned just barely outside of the action of the levers.
Levers are built into the wheel in groups of four. Although the principle of the basic group of four is good, you would never use only one group of four levers for a whole wheel because each lever would have to travel 90 degrees every time it helps turn the drive shaft, so a machine configured in this way would have a very herky-jerky way of functioning. Two groups of levers (eight) are the bare minimum, and even they are set up in a special way.
The number of degrees each lever travels is figured by dividing the total number of levers into the 360 degrees of a circle. You get 45 degrees, which means that the drive shaft will get a strong nudge every 45 degrees instead of every 90 degrees. This is accomplished by having each half of each drive shaft which has four levers hinged to it being built offset from its neighboring half section as shown below.
Three groups of four levers have 12 levers and will equate to