Hi again UFO,
If I understand you correctly your biggest complaint about Ron't build is where he chose to put the pivot point or fulcrum point. If I am wrong about that then please correct my misunderstanding.
You are asserting that moving the pivot to the left will allow the off-balance wheel to exert more force on whatever we are using as an output. I agree with that. But what you don't seem to be getting although a couple of us have tried to explain it to you is that more force equals less movement and also means slower movement of the output end of the arm.
As I know you know from your work with generators you have to have a minimum speed for the generator to put out useful power. So even if you have more force it does no good if it is moving too slow to produce any power. Now to get the speed back up we then have to gear the output back up which will load the beam back down again the same as if the pivot were moved back to the right. It is all a matter of simple gear ratios.
It might interest you to know that Ron tried some different gear ratios to see if he could get the efficiency to go up. The interesting thing is if I recall correctly the different gear ratios from the motor to the out of balance wheel and the different ratios from the counter shaft to the output flywheel actually changed the efficiency very little. The change was so small the margin of error in measurement may have been all it was.
What is also surprising to me is that as far as I can tell no one seems to be paying any attention to the video Ron did where he measured the input current under different loads. I will admit I can't explain that but the testing is right there for all to see. Somehow when the beam gets loaded that reflects back to the drive motor. It has been almost 40 years since I took a college physics class but I don't recall any of the principles of physics that would explain why restricting the beam from moving would cause the motor to see a higher load. The motor is only spinning the out of balance wheel. But not allowing that wheel to move up and down freely does cause the motor current to go up. Maybe bistander can give us some insight into that as his math skills are much sharper than mine. The conservation of energy seems to be coming into play through some mechanism here that is not obvious.
Take care all,
Carroll
If I understand you correctly your biggest complaint about Ron't build is where he chose to put the pivot point or fulcrum point. If I am wrong about that then please correct my misunderstanding.
You are asserting that moving the pivot to the left will allow the off-balance wheel to exert more force on whatever we are using as an output. I agree with that. But what you don't seem to be getting although a couple of us have tried to explain it to you is that more force equals less movement and also means slower movement of the output end of the arm.
As I know you know from your work with generators you have to have a minimum speed for the generator to put out useful power. So even if you have more force it does no good if it is moving too slow to produce any power. Now to get the speed back up we then have to gear the output back up which will load the beam back down again the same as if the pivot were moved back to the right. It is all a matter of simple gear ratios.
It might interest you to know that Ron tried some different gear ratios to see if he could get the efficiency to go up. The interesting thing is if I recall correctly the different gear ratios from the motor to the out of balance wheel and the different ratios from the counter shaft to the output flywheel actually changed the efficiency very little. The change was so small the margin of error in measurement may have been all it was.
What is also surprising to me is that as far as I can tell no one seems to be paying any attention to the video Ron did where he measured the input current under different loads. I will admit I can't explain that but the testing is right there for all to see. Somehow when the beam gets loaded that reflects back to the drive motor. It has been almost 40 years since I took a college physics class but I don't recall any of the principles of physics that would explain why restricting the beam from moving would cause the motor to see a higher load. The motor is only spinning the out of balance wheel. But not allowing that wheel to move up and down freely does cause the motor current to go up. Maybe bistander can give us some insight into that as his math skills are much sharper than mine. The conservation of energy seems to be coming into play through some mechanism here that is not obvious.
Take care all,
Carroll
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