This is a brief account about my work on my wheel over the last couple of years.
Two or three years ago a friend made a simulation of a design which I believed at the time would work. The sim revealed the flaw in my thinking but also gave me some guidance in the right direction. There has to be at least two actions and although I had two, one of them had no positive effect on the wheel’s motion.
Building the first successful Bessler wheel, is an ongoing perpetual job, pardon the pun, but it has to be, to get to the solution. I’ve tried getting my head around simulations, but generally I prefer to build.
I often think I’ve found the correct basic concept but it is never quite that straight forward. I find that the process of laying out the pieces in their predicted places and moving them by hand is more informative than a sim. It is at this early stage that you can see where the design needs to be altered, or discarded.
Curiously I have occasionally worked on a design which I had just thought of, and realised that it has echoes of a previous design that I might have rejected years ago - it happens. The new inspiration can reveal some aspect of the original design that you overlooked initially, or made an incorrect assumption about how it was supposed to work, so it makes sense not to reject too quickly.
So where am I now? The concept and the design work are done. It is more complex to make than it may seem once it’s in action....hopefully. I’m gradually putting the mechanisms together, but I sometimes only get a ten minute slot to work on it, but I will finish eventually.
If you saw the wheel in action you might think that’s so simple, just like Karl did. He understood how it worked, but could he have correctly imagined how it might work without seeing it first and in action? To me it’s like learning a foreign language; translating given foreign words into English is hard at first but it gets easier, but translating English into another language is harder because you are not given the foreign words to translate the English into. Karl understood how it worked by watching the mechanisms in action, but he could not have envisaged the design and then made it. It’s the same for all of us.
As time races by and I’m struggling to finish my wheel, I adjust pieces which are the correct ones but which are not acting exactly as I predicted, but then with a little consideration I get the right action. A few months ago, that process then led me to discover yet another of Bessler's feature which I had ignored, but without which the mechanical action does not produce the desired result.
There is a lot of adjustments and minor alterations to make even if you have what you believe to be the complete solution in your mind. I have found that I can ‘see’ the action in my mind but the reality sometimes reveals an unwanted additional problem. This can be resolved if you are physically building, but not in a simulation, in my experience.
You may have correctly assumed that my perfect design should be
precisely the same as Bessler's, but sometimes I encountered a problem in my build which seemed insurmountable, but further study of Bessler’s clues led me to make a connection to a piece of information which I had ignored as a piece of non-information, this has happened on several occasions and that is why I like to build rather than use sim software. Having said that I think a sim would be useful to validate a design once it is finished and working. In other words you don’t really know if your design is capable of being validated until you know that it works because you have a working model, and that is when you have definitely finished the wheel, and there are no more alterations to make because it works!
It might seem pointless to get verification that a wheel works when you have a working model already, but to my mind seeking verification of a design which you haven't tested in a build is even more pointless, because there are features of mechanisms which don't appear until you build them. Mechanisms can lock up at either or both ends of their range of movement, and that can lead to loss of part of the advantage indicated in the original design.
I will continue to work on this wheel until it’s finished and then publish the results and the design, but doubt that seek verification with a sim.
JC
It might seem pointless to get verification that a wheel works when you have a working model already, but to my mind seeking verification of a design which you haven't tested in a build is even more pointless, because there are features of mechanisms which don't appear until you build them. Mechanisms can lock up at either or both ends of their range of movement, and that can lead to loss of part of the advantage indicated in the original design.
I will continue to work on this wheel until it’s finished and then publish the results and the design, but doubt that seek verification with a sim.
JC
