So Many Possibilities

Since the big story of the weekend appears to be sending Katy Perry and an "all woman crew" on a suborbital ride to the Kármán line, and how excited she is to be going on her trip, not much else is being talked about.  So time for a little side story. 

Within the last month or two, someone asked in a comment what's going on in the machine shop, since I haven't posted anything in quite a while.  I haven't posted much because I haven't been doing much with my machine tools, really only little repairs, or the occasional part or two to get something working better. 

As part of that, I seem to have dropped the engine I had started back in '21, called a one by one (or 1x1) because it's a one inch bore and one inch stroke internal combustion engine.  Putting it the way I did, ("I seem to have dropped the engine") underlines that this wasn't a carefully contemplated decision, arrived at by gathering lots of data, compiling that into spreadsheets used to figure what's the best alternative; it just happened.  There were several things that intervened and sucked up time on my big mill, notably tropical storm Ian in  '22 and Milton in '24.  The work after Ian involved totally redesigning the way my tower has been supported since I installed it in the early 1990s and was completed in June of '23.  

I've had to crank the tower over to work on antennas, most recently this past fall for tropical storm Milton.  It has all held together well.  

Again, these interruptions got me away from the 1x1 project long enough to forget where I was and what I had been doing.  It also led me to think more about other projects.  In overview, the 1x1 is much like my first engine, a Webster, in being a free running internal combustion engine.  I've started to get interested in engines that have RPM control - like a primitive cruise control.  The first such engines, called hit and miss engines, have a feedback mechanism that control the engine actually firing or not, so that when they're under load, they "hit" and fire more often than when they're under a lighter load - or no load - when they "miss" most of the time.  They deliver the required power when required.

I'm more interested in making one of those than another version of what I've already done. 

Then there's more.  Ever heard of an orrery?  These are essentially model solar systems, from the relatively simple to the unimaginably complex, whether machined metal like those two or 3D printed plastic like this one.  Include the incredibly simple - just the sun and one planet, like this.

This is a screen capture at around the last 10 seconds of an almost 19 minute video showing how everything here is made.  That's supposed to be the sun on the left and Earth and moon on the right. The motions of the Earth and moon are supposed to be scaled properly.  The big, light colored things are the thumb and fingers of the machinist, wearing surgical finger cots to keep from touching the brass gears and causing corrosion.  I'm guessing the entire thing is about a half inch from end to end.

So what's next?  I don't know.  The orrery appeals to my amateur astronomer and telescope maker side. The hit and miss appeals to my decades of designing electronic control systems or control loops.