"Sine ball" in a project

Whups- the ball is for an integrator, jumped to that because that's the part I recognized.

Dave

Yeah, the olde "ball and disk integrators" I remember seeing gathering dust in the corners of some labs when I was in college.

I think they were WWII relics from mechanical analog computers used for weapons aiming or something similar.

Beautifull machining though isn't it? She(?) must be one in a gadzillion.

Jeff

It has some resemblance to the guidance computer in an old Pershing I missile.

[www_nytimes_com] [earthobservatory_nasa_gov] [wingod_newsvine_com] "I think both Brennan and Shepherd are full of crap, and that neither one has any idea regarding what they're talking about. They have an agenda of their own(they're both with righty wacko "news" organizations) and it has nothing to do with science. They can be safely ignored as bullshit bloviators."

I guess NASA, The New York Times and the Earth Observatory section at NASA are also "righty wackos"

Did you read the NASA news release, or just the Newsmax rehash of American Stinker's rehash?

It may be too complicated for those...uh..."journalists." The story is that the PDO cycle this time is likely to be a long one (their ups and downs have been tracked for decades, so they have some knowledge of these things), and the temperatures resulting from the PDO cycle are likely to swing widely enough to mask the global warming trend. Also, locally, the effects of a La Niña can push the evidence either way.

Our "journalists" used this as evidence that something is wrong with the research climatologists at NASA. Of course, these "journalists" have a deep knowledge of the science involved. Right....

-- Ed Huntress

Holy **it! This lady has WAYYYY too much time on her hands! Some beautiful machining, both the artsy stuff and the technical work. The one with the inertial nav platform is really neat, shows somebody moving the platform by hand and the gyro-stabilized platform holding position in reference to the universe. Even shows it doing a quick flip when it got near to a gimbal lock.

There is a credit line at the bottom of the home page that says the beautiful contraptions were made by Mrs. Tatjana van Vark. There is a white-haired woman seen from the back in the "Navigation and Bombing System" section. You have to see "Overview 1" of that to see what a CONTRAPTION she's built in her house!

Under Oscilloscopes, it notes Tatjana was born in 1944, she built her first oscilloscope in 1958. She's definitely got me beat by nearly a decade (of course, she got a head start, too.)

Jon

how about this page, reached through an odd series of links from the page below

** Posted from **

Umm, yeah! She's built one of those, too. See "Inertial Navigator Platform", and check out the video of her picking up the stable platform and moving it around while it is running. Extremely cool!

Jon

Doing a bit more digging, here's some info about her, and pictures of her shop!

Jon

On Fri, 02 May 2008 23:57:35 -0500, with neither quill nor qualm, Jon Elson quickly quoth:

The harmonium is a beautiful and impressive piece of work. But I wonder how many unnecessary gears and shafts there are in there. I say that after noticing that the cone gear train is all the same tooth size/pitch, so all rows of teeth engage simultaneously. Hmmm...

-- Those who flee temptation generally leave a forwarding address. -- Lane Olinghouse

Nice work.

Why?

Cheers Trevor Jones

There must be some sort of clutch to select which pair of gears is active, otherwise the shafts would be locked. You can't have both a

1:2 and 2:1 ratio, for example, between two shafts simultaneously.

the gears MUST be free to rotate on one of the two shafts - think about it - with all engaged, each with a different ratio, and with the gears locked to the input shaft, each output gear will turn at a different speed. my guess (and I can't confirm from photos) is that a clutch selects one of those gears to lock to the output shaft

** Posted from **

Now I know why you post only crap!

Nick

On Sat, 03 May 2008 11:31:23 -0400, with neither quill nor qualm, Ned Simmons quickly quoth:

I _knew_ something kept bothering me about that thing but I didn't spend the time to run it through the whole diagnostic. Thanks.

-- Those who flee temptation generally leave a forwarding address. -- Lane Olinghouse