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Speaking of cams

Bikesandfires

Donation Time
I'm speechless!! If I ever find a time machine, I'll spend several trips going back to watch things like these being built. I wonder how long it took just in design....much less actually making by hand all the pieces and assembling.
 

Tom H

Platinum Level Sponsor
Wow! The 2011 Scorsese movie "Hugo" was about a boy who was hoping to restore a similar automaton that had been his father's. I had no idea a similar actual item existed.

Tom
 

Bill Blue

Platinum Level Sponsor
Amazing machine, requiring amazingly tight tolerances. Even I could make a machine that draws a straight line, but a circle? Get out of here! In the early years of CNC, someone describe an oval as a circle made on a CNC mill.

This is very much like Disney's early automatons, only Disney focused on gross body movements. As amazing as Disney's efforts were, when compared to this machine, I don't think they added much to the science.

I love the narrator's very accurate use of the phrase "reverse engineering". A truly marvelous process, but the phase is usually used to describe the process of copying an item, such as the Russian's producing a copy of the B29. To me, that would more accurately be called plagiarism.

Bill
 

Nickodell

Donation Time
Speaking of revese-engineering: By the end of WWII, Rolls-Royce were producing the best turboject engines in the world, the Nene (5,000lb thrust) and the Derwent (the engine that powered the Gloster Meteor, the Allies' first operational jet aircraft.)
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In 1945 Britain's new socialist government sold 25 Nenes and 35 Derwents to our glorious Allies, the Soviets, who reverse-engineered them and produced 39,000 without a license as the Klimov VK-1, and also passed some to the Chinese, where they were still being produced in 1979. (When Sir Frank Whittle, the father of the jet engine, visited China in the 1980s he was treated as an honored guest at their aviation academy, where he was shown a sectioned Derwent on a plinth!)
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The first US fighter available for the Korean war, the F-80, was powered by the G.E./Allison J33, a modified Derwent, while the Soviet Mig-15 used the Klimov and RAF Meteors used the Welland, a development of the Derwent. The bizarre result was that in the first year of the war, jet fighters of all belligerant nations used developments of the R-R Derwent.
 
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