I want Gosper's young friend Julian's opinion on this. I'm still betting that there are locking solutions for moderate numbers of teeth, say, eight. In fact, I suspect there are locking solutions for all numbers of teeth, but that for larger numbers the grip would be extremely tenuous. On Mon, Jun 16, 2014 at 3:57 PM, meekerdb <meekerdb@verizon.net> wrote:
On 6/16/2014 10:14 AM, Allan Wechsler wrote:
The patent office calls similar devices "rose engines". As for locking gears, I have an intuition that the thing is possible with teeth that have concave shanks and a widened head, which can fit between the heads of the opposing teeth when at an angle, but not when straight on. (One would connect them by using the third dimension, dropping a new gear onto the surface to intermesh with one already there.) My intuition also says that the thing becomes much more delicate when there are lots of teeth.
I doubt that can be made to work. As the teeth unmesh they are pulled out almost orthogonally. You could make gears that resisted unmeshing by embedding magnets in the teeth.
Brent Meeker
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