Engineering Marvels on a Dime
> CRAFTSMANSHIP MUSEUM
The Craftsmanship Museum in Vista, Calif., offers an
impressive collection of the best model engineering
in the world. Hundreds of precision-built miniature
steam, gas, and Stirling engines; miniature gunsmith-
ing examples; model ships, cars, and planes; hand-
made scientific instruments; even unusual pieces such
as hand-knapped microscopic arrowheads are on
display. Much of the collection is also viewable online
in their “virtual museum.” It’s hard to visit, either in
person or via the aetherweb, and not come away with
the sense that you can do anything if you’re dedicated
enough...................... craftsmanshipmuseum.com

Time-Traveling How-Tos > LINDSAY’S TECHNICAL BOOKS If there’s one catalog that’ll allow you to travel back to the time of steam engines and blacksmiths, mountainside moonshiners and pedal-powered wood shops, it’s Lindsay’s Technical Books. They carry hundreds of how-to books for all sorts of largely forgotten, obscure, fringe, or replaced technologies. A gold mine for retro-technicians. ..................... lindsaybks.com

the Wonders of Mechanical Linkage by charles platt

RTFM! (Read the Ferrous Metal!) by dale dougherty

> SORGHUM PRESS

In planting an experimental “energy garden” in northern California, Julian Darley and wife Celine Rich thought they’d try growing sorghum as potential biofuel. Sorghum is normally grown in the South as a source of sugar. Growing the sorghum was easy; finding a working sorghum press was harder. The press they found is more than 100 years old. They weren’t sure how it worked, but fortunately, it came with instructions — forged into it, describing how to use and how to maintain it. One side reads: “Always keep bottom boxes filled with oil.” Below that is a terse operating manual: “Feed cane large end foremost.”

In the early days of the Industrial

Revolution, lack of sophisticated lubricants

(among other factors) made it impossible to create a lubricated guide to control the linear motion of a rod in and out of the cylinder of a steam engine. A lot of head-scratching occurred as people tried to figure out how to build a linkage that could control linear motion. James Watt could only find an approximate answer. Solving this problem ultimately took 100 years.

The solution is known as Peaucellier’s Inversor. It’s said that when Lord Kelvin witnessed a model of the device, he exclaimed that it was the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen. The geometry is difficult to understand. A proof can be found at tinyurl.com/56w6gm.

Linkages that control motion in clever ways are rare these days, but still turn up in odd places such as the trunk lid of your car. The Brock Institute for Advanced Studies has a collection of linkages in very nice Java animations at brockeng.com/mechanism.

> thanks to: Saul Griffith, Mister Jalopy, Marc de Vinck, Paul Spinrad, Charles Platt, Patti Schiendelman, Keith Hammond, John Edgar Park, Bill Gurstelle & Brian Jepson r

82 Make: Volume 17