Many researchers are convinced that Bessler's wheel contained springs for some undetermined use and I agree that there probably were. Bessler stated that there were no springs such as are used in clocks and all the usual uses for which his opponents implied. They suggested that without the springs the wheel would quickly come to a stop. I have noted many times that Bessler suggests that there might have been springs but they were not crucial to the wheel's operation.
In my own work on this project I have noted that there are situation where a spring could be useful. If you have a lever with a weight on the end and the wheel is rotated by hand to a position where the weighted lever is ready to fall, it has reached what I shall call, the pre-fall position. At that point you hand-rotate the wheel one or two degrees and the weight falls, right? But in a real time scenario the wheel is rotating, let us say, under its own steam, or you have given it a push so that it rotates, the weighted lever does not fall just after the same pre-fall position that it did when you hand-turned the wheel. It goes on for perhaps another 10 or 15 degrees before it grudgingly falls.
In this instance I have placed a weak spring with a fairly long amount of travel in it for the weighted lever to land on and compress. It is, as I say, very soft and when the wheel and its lever continues to rotate to the next pre-fall position, the inclination for the lever to fall is activated more immediately because the load holding the spring compressed weakens as the lever approaches the pre-fall position, giving it a little push to bring about the fall.
This fact is due to the wheel's rotation while the lever is about to fall. When stationary the lever responds to the next incremental degree of rotation and falls; when the wheel is already in rotation the combination of wheel travel and lever-tipping is merged so that the lever is actually falling while its position on the wheel is also falling.
Another way to engender a faster response in the fall of the lever, is to find the pre-fall position first, and then set the lever forward a few degrees so that it begins its fall ahead of the pre-fall point at which its position on the wheel begins to fall. This does of course limit the amount of travel available for inducing overbalance, but even the smallest difference should be sufficient to overbalance the wheel.
My apologies if this is difficult to explain but it is a genuine problem and solution. I suggested many years ago that the amount of travel by the weights would prove to be limited for just this reason. Those who sought success by designing weights to move a maximum amount from inner to outer would be sure to suffer failure in a working model.
As a committed hands-on builder, I am sceptical about simulation software revealing the above facts and so I continue to build. I am sure that many will jump to the defence of simulation, but I am sure that such niggles will prove invisible unless the input includes such variables.
JC
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