I’ve been planning to go to the Maker Faire in Austin, Texas this October, and I’m surprised none of you are interested in going too. If you’re not familiar with the kind of stuff that’ll be there, here’s some videos showing the cool stuff at the first two faires.
http://revision3.com/systm/makerfaire
http://revision3.com/systm/maker07
Check out information about this years faire at http://www.makerfaire.com.
I thought I’d at least heard of pretty much every type of engine there is, but this one was new to me. It’s probably what the infamous “air car” uses. I like it, it seems pretty simple, and it could run just as well on steam. Check it out here. He has diagrams of other types of engines that are also very interesting, you can see them here.
You know, the engines are the title discipline in engineering, maybe I should do a talk on the various types of engines? I imagine I wouldn’t have much to say that isn’t on these pages, but I’d still do it if there’s interest.
A month or two ago I was reading a book on Greek and Roman engineering and was inspired to make a ballista. It was pretty simple and worked reasonably well for the nonexistent amount of planning that went in to it. Pictures can be seen here. The only engineering hurdles it didn’t accomplish were adequately maintaining and adjusting tension in the springs, and a trigger mechanism to hold the string until it’s ready to fire.
I just finished a design for a trigger that uses only parts that were available in ancient times (maybe not quite, but if this were the size of real ones it could be).
The only thing that worries me is the placement of the rod in the slider. Since the position in which it holds the most tension is where the rod tries to slide forward, I’m afraid it will be easier for it to slip slightly out of position without having to move the slider down. Regardless, this will just be minor slippage so it shouldn’t be a problem. If it works well I might make two of these, one from wood for the actual weapon, and a second from plastic for demonstrating how it operates.
Speaking of ballistae, does the maker faire catapult competition sound awesome to anyone else? I would have gone just for this had they made it known with more time before the event, but alas they didn’t. Is anyone interested in doing something similar in Chicago? I bet there’s enough nerds in Chicago interested in making weird stuff to have a decent competition.
There’s seems to be a first key invention that starts a field of science/engineering, like the discovery of the wheel to mechanics, electricity to electronics, etc. But beyond that, could it all be a matter of making the “things” of your discipline out of lighter, stronger, or other interesting materials?
This idea is just off the cuff, I’d like to hear some comments either way.