Unpowered Mechanical Gate Opener
Thinking about mechanical means for auto-opening a fence gate.
Retro
Tetris tiles
Tetris tiles
Cannonballs for closers
I am pleased to report that I have been nominated to receive this year’s Most Ridiculous David Mamet Allusion award. Also: I dig the no-BS approach of this traditional weighted gate closer from Snug Cottage Hardware. No springs, no strings, no pulleys. A pretty easy remake, too, if you can find a cannonball. In other news, I have been nominated
Da Vinci’s lion springs to life
Da Vinci’s lion springs to life… (amazing video!) A mechanical lion invented by Leonardo da Vinci to entertain the King of France has sprung back to life in the Renaissance genius’s last home.
Gorgeous typewriter ribbon tins
Gorgeous typewriter ribbon tins…. via LoL.
Perpetually self-winding mechanical clock
“Atmos” is a type of mechanical clock, manufactured since 1935 by Jaeger-LeCoultre in Switzerland. The Atmos needs no batteries, no electric power, and never needs to be wound. All it requires to run indefinitely is an ambient temperature change of at least 1 degree Celsius in the range between 15 and 30 C. The clock stores mechanical energy from the thermal expansion and contraction of an hermetically sealed capsule containing a mixture of gaseous and liquid compounds formulated to provide maximum volumetric changes with temperature. The mechanism is illustrated here. Atmos clocks are laboriously handmade and very expensive, and are commonly gifted by the Swiss government upon visiting heads of state.
The pitch drop experiment
In 1927 Dr. Thomas Parnell at the University of Queensland heated a sample of petroleum pitch, also called bitumen, and poured it into a glass funnel, with a sealed neck, set in a ring stand. Three years later, in 1930, he broke the neck off the funnel and set it aside. It took eight years for the first drop of pitch to fall. The experiment has been running continuously ever since, and has produced a total of eight drops to date. The man shown in the photograph is Dr. John Mainstone, who is the experiment’s current custodian.
