Bestill my concrete block.

9 years ago

It's real, I can tell because of the pixels.

Previously, previously.

Tags: , ,
Location: 37° 48' 5.41" N, 122° 23' 50.58" W

8 Responses:

  1. deadprogrammer says:
    9 years ago at 8:36 pm

    Spin the concrete block and you have a star drive or a doomsday weapon.
    • k3ninho says:
      9 years ago at 7:20 am

      Or you're using the elastic portion of the steel's stress-strain curve to store up a respectable amount of potential energy (measure the strain of each part of that system and force*distance is the energy stored). One of the linkages or cogs is going to fail at some point and it's a little difficult to predict how the energy will come out. Leaving aside the grandiose terms like 'doomsday weapon', right now it certainly is a bomb.
      • Tim says:
        9 years ago at 1:02 pm

        Not sure if joking or suffering from poor physical intuition.

        Click on the youtube link posted below and you'll find that the builder says the final output turns at a rate of once every 2 trillion years. That's a long time. Even if you assume so little play in the gears that taking up all the slack requires only the motion equivalent to turning the concrete block one one millionth of a revolution, the machine will be doing nothing but taking up slack for the first 2 million years of operation. Friction will grind the gear teeth of the first stages into dust long before the machine can begin storing energy as you describe.
        • Otto says:
          9 years ago at 4:28 pm

          Even if you assumed that there is no slack, isn't that a rather massive amount of torque increase? I expect that there would be no energy build up, but instead the final gear would just grind its way ever so slowly through the concrete.
  2. John Adams says:
    9 years ago at 9:54 pm

    This is Artur Ganson's work, yes? Artist in residence MIT
  3. Manuel says:
    9 years ago at 1:35 am

    Video of it, in action:
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5q-BH-tvxEg

Comments are closed because this post is 9 years old.

  • Previously