Oliver E Saari was an engineer with two great professional loves in his life - writing and gear design, and he was devoted to each in their turn. The same original thinking that informed his fiction, giving life to tales of space exploration, the evolution of man, and many other topics, let him to become one of the great pioneers in gear design.
When the steam engine became available for industrial use at the end of the eighteenth century, it was mainly used for driving plunger-pumps, such as those used in English coal mines. The stream engine's piston drove a lever, that reciprocating motion of which drove the pump plunger. Called the "Beam Machine," this mechanism needed a lot of space, had many parts, and was difficult to install because the engine and the pump had to be properly aligned.
Clocks with wooden gears? In these days of gears made from plastic, steel and exotic materials; it is a little unusual to hear about a practical application for wooden gears. But that is exactly what David Scholl, the owner of Changing Times, a Harlingen, TX, clockmaker is offering us.
Saginaw, Michigan, may be home to the only gear operation in the world that requires the use of a Zamboni machine. It may also be the only place in the world where teeth on the Gears are optional.
You go, and if your name is Ryan Boxx, you go faster than everyone else. Boxx became the fastest 15-year-old in America this summer when he won his division of the National Hot Rod Association's Junior Drag Racing League National Championship.
Richard Spens has been rebuilding antique machine tools for nearly a decade. He is drawn to the ornate architecture and fascinated by the open design that allows you to see inside a machine as it operates. "Working with machines has been a lifelong thing with me," said Spens, now a design engineer. "I started building steam engines when I was 10 years old." What he's working on now, however, is bigger than any steam engine or machine tool. In rural Livonia, Michigan, Spens is converting an old dairy barn into an accurate recreation of a turn-of-the-century, belt driven gear shop. It's an outgrowth of his interest in antique machine tools and, he feels, a way to stem the tide that is costing America so many manufacturing and skilled trade jobs.
No one is quite sure when gears were invented. It's universally agreed, however, that they've been transmitting motion in one form or another for quite a long time.
It's nice to have claim to fame.
"We're probably the world's foremost authority on making gears out of ice," says Jeff Root of Virtual Engineering, Plymouth, MI.
The Gear Research Laboratory of the University of Illinois at Chicago is home to a unique tribute to gear pioneers from around the world, the Gallery of Fame. The gallery is the brainchild of the laboratory director, Professor Faydor L. Litvin. The Gallery was begun in 1994 an dis a photographic tribute to those gear company founders, inventors and researchers who devoted their careers to the study and development of gears.
Alexander Deeb Could Have Been A Gear Engineer.
"I have always had a fascination with movement and moving parts," Deeb says. "As a boy at Christmas time, I was much more interested in how and why my new toys worked than in what they actually did. That curiosity has never left me."