Text: www.padrak.com/ine/GRENGINE.html October 15, 2001 Gravity-Recycling Engine Email from Joe Courage, Oct. 2001 To: INE From: Joe Courage October 2001 Power! We have harvested it from the rivers, the geysers, the wind, sun and even the atom with all its complexity. We can now harvest it through gravity itself with all its simplicity. Johann Bessler built a number of machines in the early eighteenth century which ran entirely by gravity long before the world discovered how to generate electricity. I first learned of this when I came across a 1965 issue of Pageant Magazine. It featured an article about Bessler's "wonderful wheel." There was apparently no patent system back in those days, so inventors had a hard time getting something for their idea until they could make a deal with someone who was both willing and able to pay for it. Bessler's machine's inner mechanism had to be kept hidden from view with a tight-fitting oil cloth. To empathize with his concern for secrecy, compare his machine with the secret formula for Coca Cola, which no outsider has figured out so far. It was shown at a Leipzig exhibition in 1715. In 1717, a distinguished group of citizens and scientists were assembled to investigate it. With his permission, they performed various experiments with it and made intense efforts over a number of weeks to expose it as a fraud, but could find no trace of any and became convinced that it was genuine since it never stopped turning. Bessler once removed the coverings from his machine to show it to a French king. After seeing how the machine worked, the king remarked that it was so simple that "any carpenter's helper could make one." Bessler, unfortunately, suffered from severe emotional problems, asked for a higher price than anyone cared to pay, eventually smashed his machine and died in 1745. There is also a 1956 article with more details of some of these events at http://www.padrak.com/ine/BESSLER.html The benefits of a gravity-fed engine are clearly of such a high order of magnitude for mankind that it appears to me to be a very important and precious gift from Above. This re-invention is hereby freely given to one and all. Gravity-recycling machines will take away air pollution and a host of other environmental issues such as spent nuclear rods. Many lives will be saved as vehicles and buildings no longer turn into firetraps due to gas leak emergencies of one kind or another. When I first read the article, I found it very hard to believe. It seemed logical that brighter minds than mine would be able to see how it works. I was leery of trying to do something that others considered either impossible to do or else perhaps doable but too hard to figure out. On the other hand, if the author's sources were genuine, wow! We would all benefit. Bessler should be given a lot of credit for being courageous enough to rise above the fear of ridicule to even think of pursuing such an idea. Although the other readers apparently did not know what to make of this hard-to-believe article, it seemed to be describing events that actually took place, and I decided to go for it. For quite a while, despite all kinds of mental gymnastics as to how a drive shaft could be kept moving by the force of gravity, nothing ever clicked. But I kept on trying, like a Don Quixote, on again, off again. Then an idea came to me as to how it could keep rotating after all, and with plenty of muscle. This method is not particularly exotic looking, mechanically speaking, just a simple straight-forward arrangement of levers with weights on their outer ends, and not 100% identical to his. I wondered how much power a mechanism like this could produce, so I built a quick and dirty version with only four levers in it and with no pickup cage to keep it going, just to satisfy my curiosity as to what kind of oomph the thing might have, if any. It was intended for only one go-round of the drive shaft just to see what would happen. I was not prepared for what happened next. Steel hinges, vital to the machine's operation and firmly bolted into place, were crisply torn in two, sideways, the way you tear toilet tissue apart. Amazing! I realized that the little contraption produced a whole lot more force than I had figured on. The next version will need to have its parts beefed up, be complete and include more groups of levers in a method described below that eliminates the wrenching force of the 90-degree jolts which this first one had. It should be noted that the "gravity-recycling" engine does not disagree in any way with the third law of thermodynamics, which states that you cannot completely eliminate friction. This is certainly true; you will find no shortage of friction here. It might be worth mentioning a law of physics which has been around a lot longer, known as the principle of the lever. The many levers built into a gravity machine in a neat, orderly arrangement continually make the drive shaft go around, and the energy that comes out of the machine is thus many times more than what little goes into it to start it moving, which is practically nothing. There are only three elements involved in any such design: levers, weights and gravity. Its steel version is much more versatile than wood, easier to plan and put together and even change your mind with. It looks somewhat different from the wood version but the basic principles are the same. The explanation below talks about wood rather than steel in order to help make it easier to understand the general principles which his gravity machines used, although it is not identical to them. The machine is composed of three main sections: First, the four-sided (square-sided) drive shaft. Second, the levers, with weights attached to their outer ends and hinged to the drive shaft at their inner ends; and Third, the pickup cage, which carries each lever to the top after each of them has taken its turn of keeping the drive shaft turning. The lever does this by the action of its butt end closing in against it as part of a wide circular motion. This takes place at the instant each hinge finally straightens out, thereby doing its little bit to yank the drive shaft around. Each lever's strap hinge is located at the lever's inner end at one of the flat surfaces of the drive shaft, with the left side of the hinge bolted to the draft shaft and the right side bolted to the lever. The hinge joints are located at the corners of the drive shaft. The machine rotates about two dozen times a minute. If we use, for example, four groups of four levers (16 altogether) multiplied by 24 rpms equals 384 strokes against the drive shaft each minute. Thus each stroke, while powerful enough to do its job, is brief. The number of rpms varies according to the length of the levers and the weight of the weights. The heavier the weights are, the faster the engine is and the more exponentially powerful the engine's output is. Bessler's genius lies in his unusual offset drive shaft design, but first let's see how a basic group of four levers works and then go from there. In normal practice, you would always use more than one group for the sake of smoothness. Let's make a drive shaft using a 4-inch by 4-inch by 8-foot beam. Let's make the levers measure two inches by three inches and two feet long. If two by threes are not available, cut them down from two by fours. The weights at the outer ends of each lever would be about two pounds. Later on, of course, you can make the components much larger or tinier as you wish. This applies to all the other parts of a gravity machine. Each end of the drive shaft gets rounded ("turned") by a wood lathe into the shape of an extra-wide peg several inches long so that they can be passed through a steel bearing at each end which holds up the draft shaft by the pegs. One of these ends is connected to a transmission which turns the generator. The transmission speeds up the rpm's coming from the drive shaft so that the generator can produce electricity at the correct rpm. If the transmission and generator sound intimidating, feel free to build the recycler anyway and leave those parts off. You can always put them on later if you like. Let's visualize what the levers of each group of four look like while eyeballing them from one end of the drive shaft. The lever hinged to the right side of the top of the drive shaft is pointed to the right; the one hinged to the bottom of the right side is pointed down; the one hinged to the left of the bottom is pointed to the left; and the one hinged to the top of the left side is pointed upwards. These are spread out along the drive shaft in order to give the bolts space to fasten securely into the wood. Each heavy weightblock, in turn, has a pawl attached to its outer end which yields in only one direction to a narrow bar mounted on the pickup cage, so that after each lever twirls most of its way around the drive shaft and helps turn it on contact, it is then picked up by the pawl's function before it can drop backwards. The long thin bars are strung out transversely across the pickup cage, one for each lever. Each bar can have a short section twisted downward so that each pawl can come in contact only with its own lever and not touch the rest of them, for the sake of a quiet operation. The pickup cage surrounds the length of the drive shaft and is held together by the transverse bars which are fastened to two round pieces of plywood at each end. The plywood pieces have a square hole in their center through which the drive shaft is placed. The cage is thus positioned just barely outside of the action of the levers. Let's look at the side of the pickup cage as though it was a 360 degree circle. Each lever is carried by the cage up to the top of the circle where the lever is at zero degrees. Now let's start the engine from a complete standstill and accompany one of the levers in a winsome way as it embarks on its odyssey. Push the pickup cage slowly and it will gently nudge forward whichever lever happens to be nearest to the top of the circle. Then gravity begins to show itself as the lever moves into the first few degrees beyond the top. It will then part company from the pickup cage and start moving forward like a little bird making its first flight, giving in more and more to the increasing tug of gravity. It begins to make a curved swan dive through the air, accelerating exponentially as it plunges into a free fall. It is really flying now on a wild gravity ride and is about to wallop the drive shaft with a great amount of force. Its hinged connection with the drive shaft, which opened up during its dive, is now about to close again and the lever is about to come in contact with the drive shaft which it then slams with all its might. The heavier the weight block, the more clout the lever will pack to keep the drive shaft rotating, so it is important for the hinges to be made of high quality heavy duty material. Despite the powerful force of the impact, the drive shaft is not hurt. Except when starting from a standstill, the machine is moving around about two dozen turns a minute, so the lever hits a "moving target," and the impact lasts for only an instant. The pickup cage's transverse bar is engaged by the pawl, prevents the lever from falling backward and picks up the lever and takes it to the top of the circle, where the cycle starts over again. This upward action of the cage does not use much energy due to the lever's position on the circle being only a short distance from the top and due to the fact that while the lever is on its way up, its weight being carried by the pickup cage is rapidly diminishing while at the same time more and more of its weight is being transferred to the drive shaft, which supports it. You now have an idea of the principle of how it works with the primary group of four levers. Although the principle of the basic group is good, you would never use only one group of four levers because each lever would have to travel 90 degrees every time it helps turn the drive shaft, which means that a machine configured this way would have a very herky-jerky way of functioning. Two groups of levers (eight) are the bare minimum, and even they are set up in a special way. Use only light weights with eight levers. They are configured by dividing eight into the 360 degrees of a circle. You get 45 degrees, which means that the drive shaft will get a strong nudge every 45 degrees instead of every 90 degrees. This is accomplished by having each half of each drive shaft which has four levers hinged to it being built offset from its neighboring half section. Three groups of four levers have 12 levers and will equate to the drive shaft getting a power turn every 30 degrees. Five groups have 20 levers and the drive shaft will now only have to wait for a helping turn every 18 degrees. You get the picture. The more levers there are in motion, the more powerful and smooth the drive shaft operation becomes. The offset is very important; here is how it works. We will make a drive shaft from scratch to accommodate two groups of levers. Although you can build it differently to accommodate as many groups as you want, two groups are all we need to illustrate the basic principle. The next two paragraphs are critical. Please read. We will reduce the left half of the four by four drive shaft to three inches by three inches. We will keep it parallel to the right half. Then we cut the right half down to three by three also, but instead of making it parallel to the left half, we use the "dado" woodworking procedure to make the center of each of its flat sides line up perfectly with each corner of the left half. This makes each corner of the right half line up with the center of each flat side of the left half. In other words, instead of lining up flat sides to flat sides and corners to corners, we are lining up flat sides to corners and corners to flat sides. This way, you now have a very smooth operation with eight strikes for each turn of the wheel instead of the four hard jolts you got previously. Although the drive shaft is still a single block of wood, it works and looks as though it were two separate drive shafts that were stuck together. To make one from scratch with three groups of levers instead of two groups, which will give you 12 altogether and a lot more power, you would do it the same way: cut down the first third of the drive shaft, then from one end of the drive shaft eyeball engineer the other two sections from the center of a flat side of the first section. Visualize two corners, 30 degrees apart from each other and 30 degrees from each side; one would be part of the second section and the other part of the third section. They will serve as reference points for positioning the last two sections, and you can take it from there. To make them from steel is far simpler: Get a length of round steel pipe long enough to be the draft shaft. Then, get a length of square pipe that will just barely fit around the round pipe. You will be cutting up this square pipe into short sections for each group of four levers, for as many groups that you would like. Then you nudge the square sections sideways over the round pipe, using a hammer if necessary. These sections of square pipes are the equivalent of the square sides of the wooden drive shaft sections. Then, after you have finished twisting the square side sections around in order to correctly position them from one another by the appropriate number of degrees according to the number of groups of levers that you plan for it, weld them to the round pipe. Then weld a hinge attached to a steel lever to each piece of square pipe. This welding job illustrates the simplicity of the steel method, which eliminates a lot of work involved in the wood method. Then finish the rest of the gravity-recycling machine using the same principles as the wood method. Weld a narrower piece of pipe at each end of the drive shaft to go through the bearings. In order to get the machine to produce enough power when dealing with tight space constraints, weld each group of four levers on much shorter length of square pipes and line them up together instead of spreading them out as in the previous directions. The levers will almost appear to be on top of one another. This option involves more skillful welding and quadruples the number of lever groups for the space that you are working with. Joe Courage

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