507 Mechanical Movements | Hacker News Reader

507 Mechanical Movements

507movements.com

684 pointshelloplanets80 comments

Book (1868): https://archive.org/details/fivehundredseven00browiala

It's a great collection and exploring it is fun, but it misses on titles / names of the given linkage or movement. It makes sense when you are reading the book [0], but on a site like this where you see the individual item in isolation, a title or name would be helpful.

0: https://archive.org/details/fivehundredseven00browiala

Of possible interest

Mechanisms in Modern Engineering Design: A Handbook for Engineers, Designers and Inventors by I. I. Artobolevsky.

In 5 volumes and seven books

https://mirtitles.org/2018/10/13/mechanisms-in-modern-engine...

thanks for this!

This is great! Very interesting - thanks!

These things don't have names they have descriptions of how they work. But I see your point that some of them are described only in reference to another movement with a more complete description.

One of my favourite sites! and an interesting example of that class of sites which are book made into sites with animations/interaction --- the another classic and notable example is:

https://mathcs.clarku.edu/~djoyce/java/elements/elements.htm...

Really wish that the folks doing the 507 Mechanical Movements would finish the balance of the animations.

Curious if folks are aware of other similar text/website combinations which are still extant (many others such as Bembo's Zoo are no longer available, and of course at one point in time, this sort of thing was the province of CD-ROMs such as Leonardo).

If you haven't checked it out before, Nicholas Rougeux often does these types of modernization conversions for older printed content: https://www.c82.net/

e.g. here's a very beautiful reproduction of Euclid's elements https://www.c82.net/work/euclid

Yes, I'm familiar with his work --- it's very nice, but it's not the on-line and animated/interactive thing I was trying to describe/specify/ask about.

If you ever happened to go through Karlsruhe, Germany, there is a collection of mechanical transmission models from Redtenbacher. Some models were on display in the mechanical engineering building at the university.

I could only find this link (in German) about the collection. https://redtenbachersteyr.com/redtenbacher-in-karlsruhe/

One student from Redtenbacher was Reuleaux and there is another collection of transmission from Reuleaux at Cornell university. https://engineering.library.cornell.edu/kmoddl/

Two more great books to have in the mechanical world:

"Manufacturing Processes for Design Professionals" - amazing photos, diagrams, explanations, etc. of every major manufacturing process - great coffee table book.

https://www.amazon.com/Manufacturing-Processes-Design-Profes...

"Materials Selection in Mechanical Design" - great book with "Ashby Charts" that let you compare materials against their material properties - e.g. strength vs. weight.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/0750661682

I really love this book, I found a first edition copy in a used bookstore in Maine on vacation.

https://archive.org/details/dli.ernet.14756/page/3/mode/2up

Past discussions:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10374436, 27 comments 11 years ago.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26373539, 30 comments 5 years ago.

Thanks! Macroexpanded:

Five hundred and seven Mechanical Movements - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41579354 - Sept 2024 (5 comments)

507 Mechanical Movements (1868) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26373539 - March 2021 (30 comments)

Five Hundred and Seven Mechanical Movements - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19968114 - May 2019 (147 comments)

507 Mechanical Movements (1868) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10374436 - Oct 2015 (27 comments)

Mechanical Movements, Animated - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8019787 - July 2014 (1 comment)

Five Hundred and Seven Mechanical Movements - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6230363 - Aug 2013 (66 comments)

Five Hundred and Seven Mechanical Movements (1868) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5660770 - May 2013 (25 comments)

Passim: https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=507movements.com

Plugging a yt channel that posts lots of these sort of models:

https://youtube.com/@thang010146

This YT channel is the first thing I thought of when I saw the site.

Slightly relevant, I built https://mechanisms.ln.gy/ a little while ago

Indexed and filterable index of over 4000 visualised mechanisms by thang010146 on YouTube

What is the purpose of using bearings to build a crank mechanism as in 39? https://507movements.com/mm_039.html

Maybe it's for bearing efficiency? Note that the spur gears are rigidly attached to, respectively, the crank and the shaft. So they don't require bearings at their centres. There is a link arm which pulls the gears together, and that rotates. But the key is that this arm is not transmitting the cranking power; it just holds the parts together. So its bushings/bearings don't have to be so hefty. (Their load is going to be proportional to the transmitted power; obviously the bigger the crank and more horsepower going through it, the more tightly you have to hold the gears together. But it's going to be some fraction compared to a bearing that is directly driven.)

The note only alludes to this mechanism being used to elude a patent claim, not mentioning any advantages. Someone had patented cranks in such a way that you can weasel your way out with this arrangement. I'm guessing that the patent's drawings and descriptions specifically indicated a rotating bushing on the crank wheel where the arm is attached, and this has no such arm attachment.

Looks like there's contact between the outer diameter of the sun-gear and a surface close to the center of the planet-gear? The link arm is pulling them together and this contact keeps them apart I guess. The rotation speeds are different so you'd need a bearing? I dunno tbh - I'm not sure what the colors represent and I'm not even sure if I'm using the correct words to describe what I see.

Avoiding patent infringement.

James Pickard modified the Newcomen steam engine to deliver rotary motion using a crank (and patented it). So James Watt used the sun and planet for his steam engine to avoid infringing the patent.

The Picard patent specifies that the crank is fixed to the driveshaft, but it is free to rotate in the sun and planet setup

It makes me want to find a way to boot up The Incredible Machine [0], so many hours spent on TIM and TIM2 back in the day.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Incredible_Machine

Here you go: https://archive.org/details/the_incredible_machine_1992

Good times. Ever played Sid & Al's Incredible Toons [0]? Same same concept, from the same people (Sierra / Dynamix), but with a slightly different take and an emphasis on silliness / humour. A sound card was a must though.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sid_&_Al's_Incredible_Toons

This so much! What great games, probably my favorites over the early FPSs of the time, but in close contention with Day of the Tentacle and Monkey Island

The developer for TIM made a modern version called Contraption Maker that is a lot of the same feel and available on Steam. There is a free playable demo that plays well on my 16G M1 Macbook Air. Full version is $12.99 USD

https://store.steampowered.com/app/241240/Contraption_Maker/

This is great, but repetitive. A lot of them are minor variances on a previous example. Is there a shorter list that distills it down to novel examples of the major concepts?

This guy has quite a lot of videos of various mechanisms if you’re into that sort of thing

https://youtube.com/@thang010146?si=b91XElCL_-TgGMte

Mentioned in another comment as well, but I indexed most of his videos: https://mechanisms.ln.gy/

Robert Murray Smith made many videos on mechanisms like these https://www.youtube.com/@ThinkingandTinkering/videos

Hadn't seen this channel before.

Its great, but also pretty tragic.

For those who also haven't seen it before who might follow: the presenter (who demonstrates the mechanical mechanisms) lost his wife to a heart attack in 2024, kept the channel going for another 1.5 years, made a seemingly happy 'My Last Video' video that presented the end as just running out of new things to talk about, then he killed himself.

You know the Museum of Science in Boston has a bunch of these made in real life iirc for the World Fair in Chicago. They are so fun to see since there's a button you can toggle to activate them. My kid loves watching them go.

For ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Clark_Collection_of_Mechan...

The first two examples I looked at (https://507movements.com/mm_016.html and https://507movements.com/mm_015.html) have the ropes partially going in the wrong direction.

They both look fine to me. But I do notice some weird aliasing effects in the animation that makes it difficult to identify the direction of fast moving rope. Maybe that's the problem?

Many of these aren't animated... which gives me a great(?) idea for a new AI benchmark: "Animate the mechanical movement at this URL: ..."

Way more telling that "draw a pelican on a bicycle"

Also, set up formulas for calculating speed, torque, forces etc, of each system.

Then create a modular simulation library and point and click simulator where all the component variants are covered so that the user can piece new systems together using those components.

Also include sliders so parameters can be adjusted to see how it affects the mechanism (ex. wheel radius).

Ironically, before coming to the comments I was thinking this would be a good dataset for llms to learn real world mechanics.

For me it's a great dataset to train my own brain. This way when I'm in the field and need to come up with a fix for something I can query my intellect and come up with a solution. No accounts, internet connection, or compute needed!

You would become one big walking practical-solution-providing library of expertise hiding in a human form.

Oh no, Humans are gonna take the AI jobs!

Tried it with chatgpt, and of course it failed. It showed pulleys and belt rotating in opposite directions for a simple two pulley coupling.

That's a good training set for animation AIs. Image generators are terrible at mechanical understanding at the moment. That needs to be fixed.

AI videos of steam trains make a horrid mess of the engine linkages. Some wheels rotate in the wrong direction. Wheels rotate on stationary locomotives. Just keeping rails in parallel is beyond many Stable Diffusion type systems. Trackwork with switches is just rails all over the place. Some videos can't even keep the train wheels on the track.

Pseudo-historical AI generated videos on machinery related subjects are awful. I saw one recently on rolling mills. There are blatant errors. Some rolls are turning in the wrong direction. Useless rolls facing sideways to the direction of slab travel. Gears that don't do anything. Steel entering rolls headed for the roller, not the gap.[1]

That's for a rolling mill, which is a large but simple machine. AI misunderstanding of things with moving parts is even worse. There's now more AI slop about historical machinery in search results than real-world content.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ItWeqMpDpkk

I got Fable to create the first 5 of these as 3d animations in a threejs sandbox:

https://beta.mindcast.com/3d-mechanicals/

The sandbox was originally intended for video game effects, but it also works surprisingly well for these.

---

Quick Start:

[1] left-mouse-click to deploy a pulley

[2] right-mouse-drag to change the camera angle

[3] use the dropdown (lower-left) to switch the pulley type

---

Original sandbox source: https://github.com/majidmanzarpour/threejs-vfx

Original character source: https://github.com/achrefelouafi/SamuraiThirdPersonTemplateT...

Honestly, I miss old-style internet sites like this. Nothing fancy, just good niched out information. No 300 MB loads for something that should be simple.

Well, there’s a book from my past. Got the book to see if I could find a clever way to get high speed, low displacement and high torque from small motors without huge gearing.

The side project was dropped as life got in the way, but I really enjoyed looking at all the different mechanisms.

The Book of Ingenious Mechanical Devices was published in 1206.

https://historymedieval.com/ismail-al-jazaris-marvelous-mach...

I've got a book, hand-written, from the early 20th century where my great-great-grandfather (or something like that) made drawings while he was studying to become an engineer. The drawings are really wonderful and I wonder if I should scan them so that AI can have even more data or if I should selfishly keep them just for my daughter. Maybe something in between: maybe scan one page once in a while and post it.

Those drawings aren't animated but they look much better than the originals on that site: they're in colors and both work of art and engineering.

This site is a treasure for anyone who has ever tried to get useful motion out of a small motor. The wish for them to finish the remaining animations is very real.

Somewhat similar by the epic Bartosz Ciechanowski:

https://ciechanow.ski/gears/

Cool site. I started training seriously and the first thing that came to mind when seeing these movements was... Why did it take us so long to make weight machines (19th century) if we knew the effect of resistance training for millennia AND had the mechanical understanding?

The answer appears to be free weights did the job and people only became sedentary recently.

As a "wannabe" DIY engineer/maker and also in the 3d-printing hobby world, this is a wonderful resource...

Don’t most of these have ”names”? At least I would assume they have names so people know what they are talking about.

Also, Christopher Polhem was a Swedish inventor who created the "mechanical alphabet"

https://sketchfab.com/Tekniskamuseet/models

If you get a chance to visit the Museum of Science in Boston, one of my favorite exhibits there is a living version of a whole bunch of these that appeared at a World’s Fair. Some of them are quite clever.

I wonder if 3-d printing will extend this... There are some weird things you can make nowadays.

EDIT: now I find stuff like "walking table" and I wonder if that kind of thing predates 3d printing.

I feel like this is a website that needs to be made available with one of those swiss army USB sticks for collecting useful knowledge in case of apocalypse. Very cool.

This is great!

My first thought reading the title was this was going to be about HTTP error code 507 because something is moving data around mechanically ;)

Hmm, so "507 Insufficient Storage" when your station wagon can't hold all the tapes?

I'd love to play a game that uses these as building blocks. Is there anything that approaches it?

Erector sets now owned by Meccano came with pulleys and girders that could be assembled with nuts and bolts, but are not focused on these types of mechanisms.

I would love to see good animations of a differential gear and a detente escapement.

414 is just 1 with extra steps.

How are these the same?

https://507movements.com/mm_001.html

https://507movements.com/mm_414.html

226 is the coolest. Doubles the speed without changing the number of teeth.

I’ve had this book for a few years. It’s nice to see it in this format.

Can these be generated automatically from a small set of primitives?

I don't approve. I can't find a donation link.

Please lock this submission at 507 points…

I was expecting a new HTTP status code

Can we request animations? I want to see #27 working: