Refined Machine

As promised, I have been working on refining the mechanisms that I developed last year.

At best, what I made last year was a proof of concept. If you will recall the Primary Run, I managed to get the thing to work, and that is in many ways an accomplishment. But the mechanism itself lacked any elegance. At it's core was a good concept, but I never got it refined to it's base: a working model with everything removed to it's essential part. That may be tough to grasp, but let's look at an example.

Remember this guy? This is the core of the mechanism- which I termed my gear box- and it is pretty much four gears, a freewheel, some bearings and a flywheel (at this point I hadn't added that). It worked, but it is too big, weighs too much, and is a pain to work with (the chains need to be perfectly aligned and I ended up adding tension gears with springs to keep the chains from skipping). I can eliminate most of the mass, while adding function, precision, and adjustability (eliminating the tension gears altogether) by using this:

What we're looking at is an internally geared hub from Shimano. One one side is a freewheel gear. The other is a disk brake flange fixed to the hub. Essentially the same thing I built except the hub in this case is not one-to-one with the gear. If, instead of a disk brake, I installed a gear and placed my flywheel around the hub's body, I would have the same mechanical effect that I made preciously while gaining the ability to shift gears and cutting it's size by more than half. The frame in this instance wouldn't be wood, but rather a tubular steel... very much like a bike frame, you might say.

It's good to have clarity of mind back.
There are eight months (give or take) before the next race.
The target remains.