Having cleared the remains from previous builds out of the way, my first task was to mark out on the 3 feet wide MDF disc I’m using, the precise configuration of the planned mechanisms. This wooden disc will provide a backplate to attach the various parts. Unsurprisingly there will be five equal segments.
I’ve marked out the outline of the pentagram as accurately as I can, although I’m not too concerned by any minor inaccuracies, the basic concept is, I believe, quite forgiving.
One of the curious features of the pentagram is the perfect consistency of all the angles involved. The basic angle is 18 degrees and literally all the others used are multiples of this number; hence they are 18, 36, 54, 72, 90 and 108.
Note that Bessler having added an extra J and an E to his initials used his complete initials JEEB to become WRRO using a method known as the Caesar Shift, a well known device used for hundreds of years to encode messages. E being the 5th letter and R the 18th letter, you can see the connection to the pentagram. The remaining letters, W and J also have an important function to act as clues in the correct configuration.
As I mentioned previously I have very few pictures from previous builds and I could attach those I have, but as they are examples of failed designs I see little point in doing that. My first picture will be the marked out disc once I’ve completed that step in the process.
Then I’ll make the various pieces from wood, aluminium, mild steel, string and plastic. I calculate I will need 50 pieces plus screws etc. That’s a minimum of ten items per segment, but I may need more. I’ve already carried out some preliminary tests to confirm that one part of the design works as I planned, but after all these years I know that unexpected problems can arise as the build progresses, but hopefully nothing which is insurmountable.
JC
"...but after all these years I know that unexpected problems can arise as the build progresses, but hopefully nothing which is insurmountable."
ReplyDeleteAh...but that is, of course, the "fly in the ointment" that quickly reduces all of our efforts to naught when we discover those problems ARE insurmountable. However, when one finally has the correct design, as Bessler did, that won't be happening. The chance of you having that correct design on your first try with a new design is very low...but you can never know that for sure until you give it a try. Good luck!
Very low, yes. But it’s not really a new design, but one I’ve been working on for at least a year but not building as I knew there were further variations to make …. until it hit me like a slap in the face!
ReplyDeleteJC
I checked out your other blog and this line of yours there set off an alarm bell in my brain:
DeleteTo paraphrase Bessler’s words, “a great craftsman would be he who, as one pound falls 90 degrees, causes each of the other four pounds to shoot upwards 30 degrees.”
But wouldn't four separate one pound weighs each rising 30 degrees be equal, as far as the gain in gpe goes, to a single one pound weight rising 4 x 30 = 120 degrees? If so, it sounds like you are saying your design can make a weight rise 33.3% higher than an equal weight falls. Maybe I don't understand you reasoning? Better yet we need to see what kind of simple design can do something like that.
As each weight reaches a certain position it is quickly raised 30 degrees. Not all 4 at the same time. He used the four remaining weights as a way of hiding the 30 degrees in plain sight, four quarters or one hour equals 30:degrees.
DeleteJC
I think we have to also pay far more attention to the lines (see AP pgs. 295, 296) just BEFORE that mentioning of the "great craftsman" use of weights that John reads so much into:
Delete"I’d like, at this point, to give a brief description of it. So then, a work of this kind of craftsmanship has, as its basis of motion, many separate pieces of lead. These come in pairs, such that, as one of them takes up an outer position, the other takes up a position nearer the axle...At present, as far as I’m concerned, anyone who wants can go on about the wonderful doing of these weights, alternatively gravitating to the center and climbing back up again, for I can’t put the matter more clearly."
Many, like John (I think!), seem to believe that there were two weights in each pair (and I also assume John thinks there were five pairs for a total of ten weights inside of the drum) and the two weights were physically located near to each other inside of the drum. BUT, to me it sounds like Bessler is actually describing two weights in a pair that are diametrically opposed to each other inside of the drum so they are on opposite sides of the axle. If so, then it would seem unlikely that they were directly mechanically connected to each other. Rather all of the weights were connected together somehow (by the "connectedness principle"?) so that as each one got as close to the axle as it could somewhere on the drum's ascending side, it still had to travel 180 degrees around the axle until it finally reached its farthest distance from the axle somewhere on the descending side of the drum. IOW, the motion of the weights as they moved farther from the axle and closer to the rim of the drum was not a rapid one as suggested by the "great craftsman" making weights "fly upwards", but was a more gradual process. That "great craftsman" clue could just be one of the biggest red herrings in the Bessler literature and anyone basing his design on it could be dooming himself to a lot of time wasting frustration and ultimate failure.
I think I’ve said elsewhere in my opinion, there are five segments, each with one weight, so just five weights in total. Each segment is paired with an adjacent one so as one weight in one segment falls the other one in the next segment rises quickly.
ReplyDeleteJC
That sounds good like it's some sort of chain reaction. As each of the weights drops in its compartment on the descending side, it moves out to the rim and forces the weight in the next compartment to move in toward the axle. If that manages to keep the COG of a wheel's five weights on the descending side, then this kind of wheel will have to stay overbalanced as it turns. Maybe this is what that Jacob's ladder in the toys page is telling us to do? That toy is based on a chain reaction going on.
Delete@anon 15:41
DeleteJC won't have B's wheel unless JC's is self-starting from ANY position. That means JC's design, whatever it is, MUST be overbalanced in any position. There is no getting around that strict requirement. He's promised to start showing us something, but so far all we're getting is promises. Promises are nice, but you can't sim them.
John wrote "there are five segments, each with one weight, so just five weights in total."
DeleteBut Bessler wrote "a work of this kind of craftsmanship has, as its basis of motion, MANY separate pieces of lead."
To me a design with only a total of five weights wouldn't be described as having MANY weights in it by most people. Either John's using the wrong design again or Bessler put more than one weight on each lever? Like maybe he put three or four on each lever? That would give a total of 15 or 20 weights in a wheel and could be called "many" by most people.
I work on the assumption that five was the minimum number of weights, but in 1715 when wrote AP, he was designing his Merseburg wheel of about 12 feet diameter, so many more pieces of weight might be required.
DeleteJC
In the note for the MT 9 wheel drawing Bessler wrote:
Delete"In all places where I have found weight-figures, these weights are
seen to be simple and nothing is attached to the belts or chains. Such is the case with Leopold, but nothing is to be accomplished with his thing unless one acts out of my connectedness principle; but here I do not yet wish to show or discuss the figure for the
time being."
Bessler tells us there that using his "connectedness principle" could make Leupold's wheel into a runner. But if you check out Leupold's wheel you will find out that it had TWELVE small levers each holding one weight for a total of twelve weights in his wheel!
So, while John may be fixated on a five lever wheel and guys like Ken B on an eight lever wheel, the fact is that, if you have the connectedness principle's details, you could make a wheel with up to twelve levers work and you could probably put more than one weight on each lever! So, the heck with the number of levers and the number of weights attached to each one of them I say. Let's concentrate on that all important connectedness principle. Without that one really has nothing and will get nowhere with his builds or sims.
That is a fair comment but I shall stick to my 5 design for reasons which will become clear, I hope.
DeleteI haven’t checked the details of the Leupold’s wheel, but we don’t know what changes Bessler’s connectedness principle if applied to the Leupold’s wheel might require. Maybe an odd number as implied in MT.
JC
Okay I grabbed this image of Leupold's pm wheel from his machinery book:
Deletehttps://i.postimg.cc/1R2rb5FJ/Leupold-s-Wheel.jpg
It's supposed to be turning counterclockwise and each of the levers leaves its stop and its arm starts swinging to its left as it passes 6 o'clock at the bottom. That swinging motion, when using Bessler's "Connectedness Principle", would somehow help to swing the lever approaching 12 o'clock to its left so as to lift its weight as the lever's arm became vertical and hits its stop. You would then have two vertical lever arms at 6 and 12 o'clock and five levers and their weights on each side of the axle. The wheel would be constantly overbalanced because the weights on the left side would always be a little farther from the axle than the weights on the right side.
I don't think this could be done using just single a cord attached between the two levers, that is, between the one passing 6 o'clock and the one approaching 12 o'clock that caused that lever arm to suddenly become vertical. Rather, the lifting of the levers approaching 12 o'clock would begin much sooner like shortly after they passed 6 o'clock. As a result, even though that would make Leupold's wheel always overbalanced so it perpetually turned counterclockwise, the overbalance would not be much and the wheel would have low torque. Assuming that Bessler's added cords only connected adjacent levers, the next question is HOW did they do that. Bessler hints somewhere in MT (I think it was in the note for MT 10) that you need a special lever for the Connectedness Principle to work. To me that means that Leupold's levers would have to be changed in some way.
@anon 14:05
DeleteNice analysis and thanks for the link to Leupold's wheel which I hadn't seen before. But if what you say is true, then all of the levers on that wheel's right ascending side would have to be moving at the same time between their stops! If each pair of adjacent levers is connected together by a cord, then its ends are going to have to be very carefully placed so that all of the lever motions are precisely coordinated with each other. Trying to find out what the correct cord lengths and attachment points are, as well as the correct lever shape, would require a lot of work by building and testing or by the use of sims. Also, there were supposedly springs involved in Bessler's design in some way.
They say that the search for pm is a search for the Holy Grail of mechanics. Imo, it's more like trying to undo the Gordian Knot of mechanics!
https://everything-voluntary.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/gordianknot.jpeg
JC wrote "I think I’ve said elsewhere in my opinion, there are five segments, each with one weight, so just five weights in total."
DeleteAren't you bothered a little by the fact that there isn't a single design in all of the MT drawings that shows a wheel with only five levers in it? To me that would seem to be evidence that Bessler did not use just five levers in his wheels.
It is true anon 14:17 that there are no five lever wheels in MT. There are also no designs in MT that show an odd number of levers...with a sole exception. It's MT10 which shows 15 levers. Why only this one design which, coincidentally, is also the only drawing where Bessler hints that his wheels used a specially shaped lever. In the past SoS mentioned that if you add that drawing's number, 10, to the number of levers it has, 15, you get 25. SoS says this was a clue from Bessler that his wheels used levers shaped like the 25th letter of the alphabet which is Y.
DeleteNow I'm wondering what shapes the levers in John's latest pentagon wheel will have. Will they be Y shaped especially if Bessler has told us this is the shape to use? I certainly don't think they will be simple straight levers because his use of them back in September of 2020 turned into a real mess loaded with pulleys.
@anon14:17
DeleteObviously, the MT drawings showing B's wheels using only five levers were in those ones he removed and destroyed! Now that we know that, JC is free to chase five lever pm wheels for the rest of his days...
I think that any swinging of weights added impetus to Bessler’s wheel, but is not, of itself, a necessary feature of its drive. Therefore any swinging of levered weights in Leupold’s wheel wasn’t a necessary feature even if Bessler’s connectedness principle was somehow added.
ReplyDeleteJC
How do we know it was Bessler's wheel not pendulum ?
ReplyDeleteYes! I've been thinking the exact same thing for years. Bessler's wheels were all just empty drums except for eight useless noise making weights flopping around near their rims. The real pm part was in their attached pendulums! They are what really drove his wheels. Anon 15:20 I'm glad someone else finally brought this up. As they say, "great minds think alike". Once JC realizes how important those pendulums were, he might start to make serious progress.
DeleteShemp
Oh no! The annoying impersonating troll is back again, this time impersonating a character called "Shemp." KB's gang of sock puppets are trying to take advantage of JC while he's away building his wheel so they can stuff up his blog full of his junk KB crap. Will JC let him...or will he delete it? The answer to be soon revealed!!!
DeleteI'm sure Shemp was just being his usual sardonic self, but what he says does make some sense IF Bessler was hoaxing his wheels. That big football shaped weight at the bottom of the Kassel wheel's pendulum (there were probably two pendulums attached to the ends of the wheel's axle) that passed close to the floor would have been made from iron and was attracted to a large piece of lodestone hidden under the floor boards. That lodestone would have been installed so that it could easily slide back and forth in a greased channel at a right angle to the wheel's axle when a rope attached to it was moved back and forth in another room. The hidden lodestone under the floor boards would periodically magnetically couple with the iron pendulum weight and and "pump" it so it swung the huge pendulum back and forth and, through the rod connecting its cross piece to the axle, then caused the axle and the attached drum to rotate. The drum would have had to have very low mass to make this work. Also, only one of the two pendulums needed to have been powered by this secret method.
DeleteTo avoid detection during pretest inspections, the lodestone and its ropes would have been carefully concealed in a fake, hollowed out floor support beam on the ceiling of the room under the wheel. The person operating the rope was located several rooms away from the room with the Kassel wheel in it and some sort of signaling method was used to let him know whenever someone gave the wheel's drum a push to start it. I'm not sure how the signalling could have been done. Maybe it was possible for the assistant to hear whenever the big wheel was given a push start whether by Bessler or someone else?
@anon 1:50
DeleteSounds like the mechanical version of this:
https://youtu.be/5tFGIQrKgBc
but instead of a pulsing electromagnet Bessler's assistant would have to manually slide the lodestone magnet back and forth under the pendulum bob weight. Anyone know what the frequency of the Kassel wheel pendulum was? If it was 20 per minute that means the lodestone would have to slide back and forth once every 3 seconds.
Could work and the fake noises coming out of the drum would mask any sounds made by the sliding lodestone under the floor. Maybe the signaling was caused by the push start of the drum making the pendulum bob begin to swing and it then caused the floor magnet to slide a little and that tugged on the ropes connected to it and that told the assistant he had to start manually moving the floor lodestone back and forth?
The problem with this theory is that it cant explain how Bessler made his earlier smaller portable wheels work.
Hey John just checking in do you still believe that the wheel worked off gravitational force?
ReplyDeleteYes of course, Stephen.
DeleteJC
@sept 20th. 10:33. No my levers are not ‘Y’ shaped.
DeleteJC
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/5KY2jv8kpb4?feature=share
ReplyDeleteThe plane of an oscillating pendulum can rotate and there's nothing impossible about it.
DeleteNice demonstration.
DeleteJC