I have finally made it into my workshop and spent an enjoyable a couple of days bringing myself up to date on my own version of Bessler's wheel. Despite the cold - it's been at or below freezing for more than two weeks now and the snow has scarcely stopped falling, although it hasn't settled much here, thank goodness - despite that, I'll be back in again tomorrow and over the following days ... weeks ..... months .....!
The levers I had assembled were too long and would have generated too much lift in the weight as I had designed them - if they could have lifted it at all - and I have radically altered their lengths and therefore their lifting power - it's a bit like changing down from top gear to first, but of course there are compromises to be taken into account and I won't know until the stiff-nuts are tightened and the levers tested for range of movement, how much lifting will be available. The mechanism is set up on a test rig built for one mechanism at the moment, because I want get the action perfected before I go about constructing all of them and attaching them to the wheel itself.
I am still using the principle described on my web site at http://www.besslerswheel.com/ which mimics the action of a child on a swing. I'm convinced that the principle in Bessler's wheel requires something different to the usual overbalancing system tried so many times over hundreds of years. We know that he alluded to children's gamnes and the swing is one of the oldest. I believe that the Estonian national sport of 'Kiiking', (about which you can read at my website at http://www.247website.co.uk/html/kiiking.html and which requires the rider to swing so high that he passes over the top of the swing) holds the solution. Pictures of this sport can be found from before Bessler's time and it is believed to stretch back thousands of years. My mechanism mimics the actions of the kiiking rider.
Sometimes I have so many ideas to post blogs about that I write them up one after another and often have two or three pending publication - and sometimes if I'm struggling for a subject to write about. I get some of my ideas from the besslerwheel forum, but that seems quite flat and devoid of ideas at the moment so I'm left bereft. The things I'd like to write about I can't just now, my own project is for my eyes only until I can tell you something about with supporting evidence. My work on the code breaking proceeds steadily and I am rewriting my www.orffyreuscode.com site to include more material but that will not be ready for a few weeks yet.
I was looking at a copy of one of Bessler's panegyrics to Karl the Landgrave for the year 1719 and noted that although I have not had it translated yet, it contains sections devoted to 1819, 1919, and 2019 - how amazing and how prescient of him would it be to find that his solution was found in 2019. I hope it's found before then, we need it today.
JC
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