Sunday, February 28, 2010
Having had a hankering to make a Watt-style governor but having failed to find any plans to my taste, I decided to design my own. Here it is, with 2D CAD plans produced with Draft-IT (and GIF images of the same) and my construction notes for download. The design is hand-cranked and lacking a valve [...]
Thanks to Mike Shuter, who commented on the previous entry, for sending me his two spreadsheets with Orrery gear ratios and the “continuous fractions” method of determining wheel/pinion pairs. He has permitted me to post them here but please contact “m [dot] shuter [at] ntlworld [dot] com” if you find them useful. Please do not [...]
Saturday, October 10, 2009
This is a first public release of a Windows program for calculating compound gears (2 pair of gears) in “normal” or epicyclic arrangement. It also fully or partially automates Orrery calculations and has presets for various solar system periods, which can be modified and added to by editing the PeriodData.xml file. It allows the tolerance [...]
I don’t remember what made me think of it but I took a fancy to build an Orrery a little while ago. Naturally, my first recourse was to scour the web via Google for plans. I would have liked to find some dimensioned drawings in the style of engineering. What I did find was lots [...]
From the outset of setting up my metalwork shop I decided to use tungsten carbide tipped tools for the lathe. I just don’t want to be bothered with the fiddle of sharpening and having to keep changing the shims under the tools. This is at variance with the received wisdom that the low power and [...]
As I have a variable speed millling machine without a digital readout (its an Axminster SIEG X2) and wanted a bit more control at the hundreds-of-RPM level than I could get by listening to the pitch of the machine or watching the chuck, some technology was required…
Cycle Computer Rev Counter on an X2 Milling Machine
The [...]
I’ve recently been making a Stuart 10V with the help of the Andrew Smith/Pengwern building guide. At one point they recommend the use of a split bush to afford a greater degree of concentricity in turning the piston rod (and both the piston and cross-head attached to this). A sketch of the split bush is [...]
Sunday, December 21, 2008
This easy piece of engineering, a small Towers of Hannoi set, was a break from more complicated engineering and completed as a Christmas present.
Downloads:
CAD Plans in Draft-IT format
CAD Plans as GIF image
Construction notes
I came across an account of the “uphill roller” in a book by Julian Havil, “Nonplussed!”. The basic idea is that two cones, joined at the bases, will appear to roll uphill on a pair of diverging rails if the combination of the angles of the cones, slope of two rails and divergence of two [...]
