Beautiful Things

Beautiful possibilities

6 Likes
2 Likes

This is very cleverly done

7 Likes

Cool AF - hate to think how long that must have taken!

Indeed.

Mr Dury said it best - there ain’t half been some clever bastards.

2 Likes

That’s great!

The Japanese have always been prepared to put unbelievable effort into making perfect things. I’ve posted this before, I’m sure

I’ve heard it said that it was actually two 60 second takes cut together. But the background video doesn’t say so

VB

5 Likes

So it would seem are the British and French judging by that “making-of” vid…

I would especially like to know how they managed to get the stationary wheels to roll uphill…

Must be ~15 years old, sad to say, if you saw something similar now you would assume it was CGI, so seamless (and ubiquitous) has that become.

They fastened a weight inside the tyre and then balanced each wheel with the weight at the top. A small prod causes the weight to fall, rotating the wheel up the (gentle) slope. All that’s required is that the whole assembly’s centre of mass falls under gravity and as long as the weight is heavy enough and falls far enough that will offset the small rise in the centre of the wheel.

The hard part is actually stopping the wheels rolling back down the slope. I don’t know if there was enough ‘stiction’ on the tyre surface to allow them to do that just with balance or whether they had to use a tiny wedge behind each wheel.

VB

4 Likes

Magic.

Is that from the Madrid branch of the AA?

1 Like

Must be a little bit galling for some Honda owners!

“Bueno Excellente” - a fat, sweaty pervert who, mildly amazingly, is a leftfield DC comics character (“Section 8”)!

Rumours that he’s based on a notorious pander of hifi foo are somewhat unkind…

Maybe this belongs in ‘Today I have mainly been’ given this scruffy pic of a scruffy test setup. But you’ll have to trust me that this little valve really is beautiful. It’s a Marconi D.E.R. (Dull Emitter Receiving) from when there were so few valve types that you could identify them just by a description of what they did. The circular blur on the side is actually a BBC stamp saying ‘Type Approved By The Postmaster General’ which identifies it as having been made between 1922 and 1924. When it was launched it would have cost you 40/- (two quid) which would be the thick end of £90 now. It has an individual serial number. The insides are just as simple as they can be http://www.r-type.org/exhib/aab0001.htm. Remarkably this one still works, although there’s no data sheet so I don’t know how well.

VB

8 Likes

Actually someone over on a vintage wireless forum has just pointed me to data for this valve (Wireless World from 1924 http://www.americanradiohistory.com/Archive-Wireless-World/20s/Wireless-World-1924-08-S-OCR.pdf page 631) and it turns out that mine is running at 90% of what their new one was doing. I’m jolly pleased with that :grin:.

VB

4 Likes

My God, it’s full of stars !

4 Likes

Where are we?

That’s what people would say if they walked into a room where you and I were Dave. :slight_smile:

3 Likes

Very true fellow thespian. :clap:

1 Like