507 Mechanical Movements (1868) | Hacker News Reader

507 Mechanical Movements (1868)

507movements.com

159 pointsNaracion30 comments

There are several editions of 507 Mechanical Movements available on the Internet Archive. I was so impressed with this little book that about a decade ago I downloaded the PDF and turned it into a properly bound book.

Here's the 1871 edition on the IA:

https://archive.org/details/Mechanical_Movements_507

I once argued with a colleague that this collection is akin to our software patterns. They are solutions to recurring sub-problems and are a mark of a mature engineering discipline.

It's similar to a library of functions.

In case you missed it yesterday, this goes well with http://animatedengines.com/

If you like such things, Nguyen Duc Thang has a ridiculously extensive collection he has been modeling, which can be seen at https://www.youtube.com/user/thang010146/featured.

Nice ... it would have been nice if the gear ratio was written out for the rope mechanisms.

Interesting history on this one:

39. Sun-and-planet motion. The spur-gear to the right, called the planet-gear, is tied to the center of the other, or sun-gear, by an arm which preserves a constant distance between their centers. This was used as a substitute for the crank in a steam engine by James Watt, after the use of the crank had been patented by another party. Each revolution of the planet-gear, which is rigidly attached to the connecting-rod, gives two to the sun-gear, which is keyed to the fly-wheel shaft.

http://507movements.com/mm_039.html

Animated: https://www.youtube.com/user/thang010146

This is neat! It doesn't seem the same though. The coloured pictures on the site are animated if you click.

I'd like to see #29 used in a 3d printer. One spiral driving 3 gears that pull the filament down through the center directly into the hot end. A tiny stepper should do since there is a huge mechanical advantage.

How would you tension the three gears to provide the right amount of pressure across variations in filament diameter?

I wonder how much wear there would be in the spiral sliding across the gear teeth.

>> How would you tension the three gears to provide the right amount of pressure across variations in filament diameter?

Good question. The teeth should be 1/3 apart, so maybe just dig in if the filament is too thick?

There has to be a way, it's just too bougie not to exist.

http://507movements.com/mm_152.html would this not draw a circle?

No, watch which rod passes the center when the bar is horizontal and vertical.

Thank you!

There is a YouTube channel called “makers muse” where a guy 3D prints some of these. By the looks of it, most of these designs are kind of useless

You looked at one particular guy's YouTube channel where he 3D prints them and that was enough information for you to decide they were useless?

I read it as two separate notes

1. There's a guy with a yt channel that makes some of these (ostensibly the more useful of these 507)

2. The remainder of the 507 on this site are mostly useless

Which i can understand. I'm sure there's a ton over overlap in functionality with varying complexity.

Just about none of them are useless. All of them were used somewhere. That's how they made it in the book in the first place.

You don't have to look around a farm yard or even a suburban garage too long to see a large subset of these in the wild.

A lot of these sorts of mechanisms have however been made obsolete by modern mechatronics.

For example, washing machines used to have complex gear boxes that made that back and forth motion during washes and also had a second mode for high speed spin cycles. The machine I bought last year has a direct drive BDC motor that simply used electronic control to produce all the motion types. It's just cheaper and in most cases more reliable.

My previous machined died from gearbox failure and replacing it was not economically viable.

Sounds like a cool HTTP response code when accessing a page with Selenium.

Not really sure on number 7 there. Can anyone explain?

It's confusing because the drawing omits a pulley attached to shaft "a". Shaft "b" is hollow, shaft "a" turns inside shaft "b". As drawn, shaft "b" will rotate and turn bevel gear "B". If the belt were moved to the [undrawn] pulley on shaft "a", bevel gear "A" will rotate, causing "C" to turn in the opposite direction. The topmost pulley presumably slides left or right to engage the different bottom pulleys.

It’s not clear from the picture. The belt seen is actually on one of three pulleys. The pulley on the left of the belt drives shaft b, which spins B and turns the output. Likewise, the puller to the rights of the belt will turn a, and therefore A.

The things that are most unclear is that the shaft between b and B is hollow (allowing the shaft from a to A to pass through) and that there are three unconnected pulleys the belt can ride on.

This is amazing.

#27! Amazing

This is one of those sites that I try to turn into a PDF every time its posted ..

Why do you need it in a pdf? To see more thumbnails quickly?

The whole thing is based on a book, which is already available as a PDF, among other things: https://archive.org/details/Mechanical_Movements_507/page/n1...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com