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The Finsrud machine

Buckaroo said:
Yet on the website in the OP it says:

The first bit sounds like a lot like an artist self-promoting.

Nifty gadget, whatever the case!
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Yes, I forgot to put that in context. Thanks.

He appears to be a Californian at heart, if anybody knows what I mean... I used to live in Santa Barbara. :)
 
Ririon said:
Other mentions of the same machine:

http://www.galleri-finsrud.no/sider/mobile/linker.html

Drawings:

http://www.galleri-finsrud.no/sider/mobile/tegninger.html

He does in fact claim perpetual motion on his own website. He says it started in 1996 and will stop "when it gnaws itself to bits, some time in the future." Maybe that page hasn't been updated since 1996, either...
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I found a site with much better drawings, suposedly by the artist, but can't find it again so far. I can't Identify the source of that 'clack' noise when it rolls around!
 
" solar powered vane doohickey in that glass enclosure. "
Radiometer. The glass bulb is evacuated and the vanes are black on one side white on the other.
Always thought they might make a nice solar windmill for power generation in space.
 
kleinjahr said:
" solar powered vane doohickey in that glass enclosure. "
Radiometer. The glass bulb is evacuated and the vanes are black on one side white on the other.
Always thought they might make a nice solar windmill for power generation in space.
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They aren't totally evacuated, and that's actually critical. They're mostly evacuated so that air resistance and thermal conductivity is low, but you need some gas or it won't work. The black side gets hotter than the reflective side, and when gas atoms hit the hot black side, they absorb energy, getting kicked off at higher speeds and giving an impulse to the radiometer as well. So you can't do this in space without having a bulb to contain that low-pressure gas, and it wouldn't be as efficient as solar cells anyways.
 
From what I can see in the video, I would guess that the device is powered by a current impulse though the steel ball interacting with the magnetic field. When the ball goes by a magnet, it contacts a wire between the rails that swings with the pendulum. I am thinking that there is a battery hidden somewhere - probably in the central column. The speed of the ball is controlled by where it touches the wire – if the ball arrives too early, it misses its impulse.

If there is no battery, the only other source of power I can imagine is an interaction between the aluminum track and the steel ball. They could possibly work as a battery if the ball and/or the track were coated with something to act as an electrolyte. This could tie in to the comment about the device running till it disintegrates. If the power is from the ball/rail interaction, those parts will be consumed as the device runs.
.
 
Hi

This was all covered over on the... oh drat... Irish company - over unity machine - full of FAIL...

STEORN!!

Over on the Steorn forum (can't find a link). I believe that the final conclusion was that it was a pendulum with a mess of distracting, pretty gew-gaws on it.

It's a piece of beautiful, gew-gaw intensive art, which M. Finsrud sets in motion by, "cleaning," the circular rail.

Ewww! Thread necromancy! Ewww!
 
Yeah, just googling, sorry about posting from the dead. So it was just a pendulum running on inertia?
 
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Hi

cydne said:
Yeah, just googling, sorry about posting from the dead. So it was just a pendulum running on inertia?
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I think so. Pendulums are wicked good at conserving momentum, and a little, "cleaning the track," goes a long way.

I don't remember if they decided if it was a conical pendulum, though....
 
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After sleeping on it, I reject the pendulum conclusion and offer a way to get energy from the ball/rail interaction. It all hinges on the cleaning of the device. I think the cleaning solution could have been lemon juice and microballoons. That would provide electrical isolation and an electrolyte to form a battery. It would run till it got "dirty" and needed to be cleaned again.
 
Hi

cydne said:
After sleeping on it, I reject the pendulum conclusion and offer a way to get energy from the ball/rail interaction. It all hinges on the cleaning of the device. I think the cleaning solution could have been lemon juice and microballoons. That would provide electrical isolation and an electrolyte to form a battery. It would run till it got "dirty" and needed to be cleaned again.
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...but it's not.

Cleaning the track is is done by wiping it down with that long, dry piece of paper that winds up in his pocket at the beginning of the video...

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=553061720631716456

It's just a beautiful and engaging piece of art...



with several iterations.



(From his web-site.)

Also, from a vague memory of the Steorn discussion, if you go to see the thing, and you say it's just a sculpture, he'll tell you it's perpetual motion. If you say it's perpetual motion, he'll say it's just a sculpture.

He's an artist, right?

:D Pimp the controversy! :D
 
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If you can run a pendulum clock for over a year with just a plain old torsion spring you can easily run a ball around a smooth, steel track for a few hours with the same.
 
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