I must apologise for my absence this last few weeks, but thank goodness my house move is completed! There are still a few boxes waiting to be opened and the contents made to disappear but we're in at last. I haven't got my workshop yet but I'm confident I will be back at work on wheel building very soon.
I was about 15 years of age when I first encountered the legend of Bessler's wheel and although I immediately suspected the maid's account of how Bessler fooled everyone who came to see his wheel, I never suspected that I would spend the next 56 years years (the rest of my life so far!) trying to discover how he did it.
I think I know now, at last, but as my wife reminded me, I once told a man I was sitting next on a plan to Florida back in 1996, I was on the verge of a breakthrough even then! But I wasn't, and it is part of my routine to remind myself to keep my enthusiasn/self-confidence under conrol.
My first wheel took the form of a hollow three dimensional swastika made of balsa wood. It had one large ballbearing in each leg and remained absolutely motionless unless you nudged it a little when it would turn about a quarter of a revolution and then stop again.
There have been so many different versions since then that I have lost count but it must be well over a hundred and possibly two hundred. Not a single one has shown any inclination to turn more than five or six turns before stopping. Am I ever tempted to chuck the whole research after so many failures? No, because I know that that Bessler's wheel was genuine and I have broken so many pieces of code that I think I have the solution. I was writing up my conclusions until I started to move house and I shall return to it as soon as I can and I will publish it, but I want if possible, to build it first to test my hypothesis.
I believe that the clues I've found clearly show evidence of Bessler's intention to hide information which would help to understand the workings of his wheel, but the best evidence remains hidden in chaper 55 of the Apologia Poetica. See my website at http://www.orffyreus.net/ for information about the clues I've found in Apologia Poetica.
Discussions have surfaced again on the besslerwheel forum about the drawings in Apologia Poetica and in Das Triumphans and the inclusion of pentagrams, see my own interpretations at my website at http://www.theorffyreuscode.com./html/apologia_wheel.html
These interpretations were made a few years ago, and I have found and solved many more since then, but as they refer directly to the wheel I am working on (soon!) I prefer to keep my findings to myself until I have had at least one attemt to translate them into a physical reality.
One thing I do know and that is this, should my own efforts fail I am certan that the information I pass on will lead to a successful working wheel by someone with a more skilled engineering talent.
It's good to be back!
JC
