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12 May 2024 15:47
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Question |
| Asked by: |
Glenn Hawkins |
| Subject: |
Propulsion |
| Question: |
This is a re-post from elsewhere.
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Ezekiel for you little Murderers
Hello,
I’m giving you the neatest trick to do with a special kind of toy gyro. It’s an old trick I never thought to mention, until someone said that Ezekiel said, “…a wheel that goes not the way it turns”. I don’t believe it’s inertial propulsion though it could be argued very well that it is. It isn’t part of my guarded methodologies and you’re welcome to. I think I understand it anyway as well you may. During the first time you see it operating it has the power to shock one’s senses in the neatest way.
Here’s the example. In my limited collection of gyros I have a couple wherein the wheel is encircled by a plastic rim shaped like and octagon. That is, rather than having a smooth curving rim over the wheel, the rim has eight sides to the outside potion and would sat on one of these sides on a tabletop while the gyro spins. Also, on one axel there is a relatively heavy, speed-increasing gearbox that you insert a linear, plastic gear into and pull. This side has weight and so the gyro is off balance. That is the gearbox on one side of the axel weights it down causing a tendency to tilt the gyro toward the weighted end.
There’s more, the rotation of this particular gyro in my position is is also very much out of balance so much that it vibrates powerfully and fast. If you had such a gyro you could drill a hole in the edge of the wheel and it should likewise vibrate. It must be made to vibrate wildly.
We’re ready now. Spin up this gyro with the plastic gear and sat the gyro down on a smooth level surface. I use a large glass desktop. You can smear it with 10-weight oil if you like as you want to eliminate friction into almost none existence between table and the flat side of the rim. Tilt the gyro’s heavy gearbox toward the floor and toward your body. Hold it a half second and release it.
The 2 & 1/4” radius gyro will accelerate across the table two feet vibrating all the way. It’s quick. The path of acceleration is almost straight and at a right angle to rotation. The vibrations, which keep the gyro suspended in the air most of the time, slow markedly in a bout a half-second. Then the gyro begins to describe a curve for six inches further and quickly stops on the tabletop. If you crash the gyro while it is traveling you’ll find it has a lot of momentum.
Because of the smooth surface-to-surface, hard plastic to glass, friction between the two surfaces would seem negligible. Therefore one is left to wonder whether the gyro was able to find enough traction to push a hypothetically suspended tabletop of equal weight rearward with equal and opposite force and distance.
I could go on with how you could use two such gyros in space positioned opposite to a magnetic plate and that they should do the same thing and blab, blab, blab in detail, but I won’t. If you can obtain one of these you might like to watch it and play with the possibilities in your mind. I think it’s manufactured in China.
Somehow I don’t quite accept this as inertial propulsion, but surely it is the neatest trick to see and show, because the action is so against everyway we generally perceive as the way things are supposed to happen. It is “…a wheel that goes not the way it turns”.
If I ever start posting pictures on another site I will present it and other things.
Bound voyage my beauties, I’m currently in space traveling after the Pluto unmanned space flight. I want to see how this human project goes and report it universally. You know. The progress of you slow, but dangerous, self-murdering little species interest everyone out here.
Glenn H.
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| Date: |
27 February 2006
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Answers (Ordered by Date)
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| Answer: |
Glenn Hawkins - 04/03/2006 04:32:04
| | | I can no longer get these octagon gyros to behave as I explained. In the last few days I’ve repeated the test. They won’t thrust for me. I’ve no idea why. I am perplexed. I may understand later.
Glenn,
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