Loading the wheel

[graham]

This might have been talked about before and if it has I apologise ,however this question bothers me because in reading about the "tests" I can find no answer.

When the big wheel was tested, it lifted a heavy box of stones by having a rope wrapped around the axle. No mention is made about how the load was applied. Was the rope initially slack or was it taut ?
If it was slack to let the wheel get up to speed and then the rope tightened with a bang it must have suddenly slowed the wheel.
If it was taut then the wheel had a powerful "built in" imbalance even though it was not running.
Important clues are missing from the descriptions of the tests.

What about the stampers? Same questions here.

Could it be that in some clever way "the load applied to the wheel " was reponsible for the imbalance behind the oilcloth?

Those pendulums could have applied a pulsing load provided that they were not running at their natural period .And the extra weights at either end of the crossbar would have slowed their natural period down.
Maybe an unloaded wheel would not have run at all without those pendulums.

Questions Questions , where are the answers?

Graham

[ken_behrendt]

Graham wrote:

If it was taught then the wheel had a powerful "built in" imbalance even though it was not running.

I suspect that the rope was simply suddenly attached to the rotating axle and immediately became taut as the box of weights rose. This sudden application of counter torque to the axle would definitely have slowed the wheel, but not enough to stall it out.

Why not? Remember that the wheel had, perhaps, a hundred pounds or more of lead weights rotating at 26 rpm's about a circle 12 feet in radius. That represents a flywheel with a lot a angular momentum.

Even a wheel is only a small amount of "built in imbalance" (like maybe with a CG that was only a few inches away from the center of the axle) could still produce more than enough torque to overcome the counter torque of the weighted rope acting on its axle. If not, then the rope from the box of weights would have been fed through a pulley system to reduce the amount of counter torque it applied to the wheel's axle.


ken

[1712]

I think that the best way to apply the load would have been to just loosly drape/wrap the rope around the axle about ten times (a sort of clutch), then someone could have gradually pulled the free end tight and the rope would have caught around the axle and pulled the load at the other end.

WH

BTW: So who's "Gene"? My name is Warren.