Mr. MWS is tempted to write a ‘Sex musical’… "The hills are alive with the smell of debau-cheryyyy ".
The foreign holiday season has started
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Grienberger’s 1603 scheme to lift a “geometric” Earth of made of solid gold - suitable platform notwithstanding, I believe the gearing would have worked for the weight then estimated -
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The gearing might, but no realistic rope nor any material out of which we might make the later gears would be strong enough. And I think the whole scheme would run into trouble with friction.
Of course the whole idea’s founded on a misapprehension of what causes ‘weight’. He’s assuming that something’s weight is an intrinsic property. In fact (everyday) things weigh what they do* because they’re attracted by gravity to the massive earth. But the earth as a body isn’t attracted to itself, so if we want to move it there’s no ‘weight’ force for us to work against. A tiny rocket only as strong as a mosquito could push the earth away from where it is now. It would just have to push it for rather a long time to achieve anything noticeable.
To give an idea of scale, if I’ve done the sums right the gravitational force holding the real earth in its orbit round the sun is about 1.8x10^21 kgf. But the mass of the earth is 6x10^24 kg, and gold is about 3.5 times as dense as the real earth. So if Grienberger’s machine was designed to deliver about 2x10^25 kgf then we could keep the earth in its current orbit by ditching the sun and replacing it with a Grienberger machine in the same place, attached to the earth by a 93 million mile long rope, and we could chuck away four of Grienberger’s cogs.
Just because we could though doesn’t mean we should. Thinking like that is what’s led to HS2.
VB
*Yes, yes, weight, general relativity, I know (well, I sort of know).
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Can’t argue with any of that Graeme.
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It could be wrong. It’s quite late and I have had a few ales 
. But as a quick check he’s got 24 cogs, each delivering a mechanical advantage of 10, so the 2x10^25kgf I reckoned at the earth end would correspond to about 20kgf at the first cog. And @pmac would be happy with a bloke lifting 20kg.
VB
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One of these days I will remember to use more words like “hypothetically” and “theoretically” in these posts! 
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20kg, 2 man lift.
This is my friend Shelley Wright
As she says of her fireman’s kit
The main gear weighs 25 kilos, and that’s without other equipment. However you get all the training you need and one of the advantages that I have in being smaller is that I fit into windows and other places that we need to access.
VB
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What an - Alaskan snow dragon is.
Via the medium of ‘Have I Got News For You’ and thence the Heritage Crafts Association, I’ve discovered that we no longer have anyone in Britain who can make a Test-cricket ball to British Standard BS 5993, nor a lacrosse stick, gold leaf or papermaking moulds and deckles - all extinct, skills recently lost.
Among depressingly many other crafts listed as variously-endangered are surgical instrument making, shoe and boot making, diamond-cutting, iron-founding, brickmaking, piano-making, and watchmaking.
Obviously cheaper offshored mass-production has mopped-up 99% of the market, yet demand still exists for various reasons, but reading-up the common factors seem to be a lack of education at all levels and a complete and utter lack of government support. Curiously we can afford to subsidise the likes of $trillionaire Jeff Bezos, for example, by allowing taxes to go unpaid on all the shitty Chinese dross he panders…
Disheartening stuff.
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Opportunity!
Might try to make a watch.
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Absolutely.
And not just on the supply side. The vast majority of people don’t consider the shittiness-exacerbating effects of posting a link to a product on Amazon. Or they do but don’t care - convenience & low prices at any price.
Either way it means fewer people making decent quality things in the UK/Italy/US/etc., higher prices for those things and fewer places to buy them. It’s very sad.
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Yep, we are depressingly backwards in the UK especially.
Just looking at watch making I had a quick and dirty scan of The List:
DE:
78+ brands
~15% made fully in-house, inc. movement.
~75% some German manufacturing
~10% no German content
UK:
59+ brands
~5% made fully in house
~5% some UK manufacturing
~90% no UK content
Germany has an entire town (Glashütte - literally “glassworks”) with its own watchmaking industry and a dozen different makers, setting standards for same, and enforcing use of its name.
It baffles me somewhat that the UK has zero taste for this sort of thing, because you can follow an incredibly old-fashioned business model (tiny numbers of items sold, looooong production times, highly bespoke, etc.) and still make a very good living - e.g. George Daniels built just 24 watches in his 80+ years, yet could afford to own a fleet of classic racing cars, including the original “blower Bentley”, so you hardly have to follow an industrialised path to be highly successful…
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Marrying one of the littlewoods empire helped a bit.
Fully made his own money and life, but his later life and ability to buy a mansion and workshop with some of the most expensive and best tools was definitely helped by this.
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I hate it when old trades go extinct.
Can’t find a ‘wattle and daub’ man around here for love nor money, come to think of it I haven’t had a visit from the night soil man since I have been here.
Is that risky ? I don’t think I’d have considered that until I had enough security to be able to afford to fail at it. I wonder sometimes if this country’s unusually strong finance sector was, over the last few decades at least, partly to blame. Quite a few contemporaries of mine were tempted into it. Some of them made LARGE amounts of money, and not all were super-bright. I think very few failed badly.
VB