Turquoise Energy Ltd. News #101
  covering June 2016 (posted  July 8th 2016)
Victoria BC
by Craig Carmichael

www.TurquoiseEnergy.com = www.ElectricCaik.com = www.ElectricHubcap.com = www.ElectricWeel.com

Month In Brief (Project Summaries)
- Commercializations? - Variable Torque Converter (PGTC) Transmission - Taxes - LED Lighting - J1772 adapter - Rocket Stove

In Passing (Miscellaneous topics, editorial comments & opinionated rants)
- Climate Chaos: Jet streams weaken, cross equator -  Mass Animal Die-Offs - Speculation to Help Fuel High Food Costs - Very Hot Drinks Linked to Esophageal Cancer - Coffee is good for you - Precious Metals Price Breakout - Screw for Denmark! - BREXIT - A War Would Have No Winners - Dimetrodon: Contrary Statements? - Huge Beetle (what is it?)
- In Depth Project Reports -

Electric Transport - Electric Hubcap Motor Systems
* Electric Hubcap motor, Chevy Sprint & Variable Transmission:
  - Take-apart of Sprint manual transmission
  - Two-Sun Planetary Gear?
  - Simplification: differential gear to replace planetary gear
  - Slipping gear to link to drive shaft to return previously wasted energy
  - The Sticking Brake: Half the Problem All Along!
* Idea for a New Type of Flat Belt Torque Converter: A "Double Barrel Torque Converter" (might actually be useful?)

Other "Green" Electric Equipment Projects (no reports)
Electricity Generation (no reports)
Electricity Storage - Turquoise Battery Project (NiMn, NiNi, O2-Ni), etc. (no reports)


June in Brief

   I seem to have written on many noteworthy topics in In Passing, mercifully rather briefly on each one. Several of them seem to form a linked chain of topics.

   What project work I did was on the variable torque converter for the Chevy Sprint. No other projects even made the radar screen in June owing to busyness with other things including last year's corporate tax return.

Commercializations

   I dream about commercializing some of the technologies I've been working on for so long now. And I believe it will happen. The world is now changing rapidly. As good-hearted people of means realize that new energy technologies just aren't happening the way they ought to be, some get interested in contributing to the planet's future themselves. And of course there is very good potential return on investment to be made in such fields. And I have made much progress over the years on various things, and these newsletters may occasionally be read by people with connections.
   Someone has introduced me to an intermediary to another potential source of green energy funding. Specifically mentioned was ocean wave power. This seems like a very good, doable project, starting of course with a pilot project installation - perhaps somewhere in the west coast wilds where they aren't on the grid? And successful larger installations could bring in fabulous ongoing revenues to the makers and investors... and dare we imagine, lower power bills for everyone?
   Some of what I've been busy with, contributing to a delay of this newsletter, is correspondence with those interested in this project.

   Communications have focused on an ocean wave power project. But the green energy funders might have a broader view too, and it would also be nice to discuss the possibility of commercializing the Electric Hubcap motors, as well as further developing even better motors and controllers, and the torque converter transmission (which with a further improvement I now believe will be marvelous). And perhaps smaller things like the CAT standard 12VDC wiring products, LED space and grow lighting, and solar connection products.
   The nickel-air batteries and perhaps the VHE ray converter/electric generator will be mentioned as well, but I want to concentrate at first on the more developed things where investors will see a clearly definable path from start to finish, to salable products.
   Rick Linden's floating river hydro is surely worth a mention at some point, too. I could see that being scalable from little auxiliary units carried around for camping on creeks to giant permanent installations on major rivers for helping to power the grid. This is especially applicable to BC where there are fast-flowing streams and rivers everywhere.
   But for now, the wave power!

   I met with Jay James, the son of someone I know, who wanted to make a new design in plastic, and wanted to know more about 3D printing, possibly to make a prototype. It was a possibly useful design, but I didn't think he'd get anywhere marketing it. He mentioned he lived off the grid with 12 volt power.
   I thought of the CAT standard 12 volt wiring system I had come up with. Seeing how I've done so little with it myself in a couple of years and since I was potentially frying bigger fish, and seeing he had experience with 12 V systems, I suggested that if he wanted to try to commercialize that, to make them, sell them and install them, it might be a good business proposition for him and I would help out where I could. I showed him my plugs, sockets and wall plates, and gave him some samples. I think he was excited by the prospects.

Variable Torque Converter (PGTC) Transmission in Chevy Sprint:
 - Sticking Brake has been a main source of problems all along!
 - New Configuration with Differential Gear & 2 Pulleys will return slipping belt energy to shaft.

   I managed to pull all the gears and things off the transmission shafts of the manual Sprint transmission without damaging anything in order to re-configure it into a "double sun planetary gear". I wasn't sure how it could be done, and on the 9th it occurred to me to see what others had done along those lines on youtube. I kept thinking that the 20 ton hydraulic press was the right tool... but I couldn't see how to fit things into it to press in the right places. The tiny space between each gear was a big problem for inserting something solid between them. I finally just put the press on the biggest gears and a couple of times pressed several off at once. But it worked, with 3 to 5 tons of force each time.
   A second reason for disassembling it was that I thought I might use the whole transfer case and have an oil-lubed system.

   But soon I was onto another idea: I had noted long ago that a differential gear, like a planetary, had three separate connections. A video reminded me of this idea. If only one wheel of the car was driven, the heavy differential gear could be used for the variable torque converter. I had originally dismissed the idea of driving only one front wheel out of hand. Upon reconsideration, it seemed like just the right thing to do. By using the left side as the slipping gear, one could get a variable rate to the right wheel.


   While the wheel was apart, I went to an auto parts store and I replaced the front left brake cylinder. I knew all along that it had been sticking, but it didn't seem to be much. However, the car was so much easier to push I immediately realized that it had been a considerable part of my problems all along! It knocked 20 or 30 foot-pounds off the force needed at the wheels to start the car rolling. Not only would the planetary gear torque converter have worked better (and I might have even licensed the car and run it on the back streets), but some of my earlier and more adventurous designs, such as the magnetic impulse torque converter as well as the centrifugal ones, might at least have got the car moving.

   Then a superb refinement occurred to me. The left side slipping shaft ended up being under the extended motor drive shaft, and it turned the same direction. Instead of slipping the pulley to a stop, it could be slipped to another pulley on the drive shaft. Thus much of the slipping force would add to the motive force to help bring the wheel up to non-slip speed rapidly, instead of being wasted. Instead of a rope, since everything was now rotating, it would be easier to use a flat belt and an idler pulley to tension it.

   It appeared I could use the two flat belt pulleys I had made on the 3-D printer quite a while back to get a reasonable drive ratio (albeit the driven wheel would turn the opposite direction from the motor... so what?), and the same 'poly-V' belt I had been using as a flat belt. some of the pieces including a couple of the manual transmission pieces proved to be just what I needed to attach the pulleys.
   This time I would put sides on the pulleys to keep the slipping belt from coming off one side somewhere. And this time there was room around them for some fat side pieces. I got some aluminum scraps the right size at AGO, and large hole drills for the center holes on the 28th (each one was a different size) and did some work on the 29th, but mostly I was too busy with other things to work on it.

   The aluminum 'idler pulley' (which I had also made) and its mounting and connection for the driver to tension it will have to be installed. Completion and installation of the components, and testing, will be done in July... I hope.

Tax Return

   In off hours now and then since the start of March I had finally decided - based on looking back through TE News issues - what R & D projects to report to Canada Revenue for 2015. Then I roughed out what to say about each one for the SR & ED tax credit program. Then I sorted out receipts for materials I had purchased for each project in that year and added them all up. About the middle of the month, with my accounts getting low and having a lot on credit cards, I started thinking I had better get serious about it, as my potential SR & ED tax credit refund will be my main source of income for the work of 2015 in order that I may continue in the latter part of this year. So the projects finally were set aside for 10 days to accomplish this and I finally put the package in the Canada Revenue drop box on the 24th. It probably would have taken at least a couple of weeks or so overall - 14 plus days - if I had been able to sit down and do the whole thing without other diversions. It looks like I'll get about 15000 $ for my efforts of 2015 (not to mention the time spent writing it up), but of course I spent much of that on materials. Really, the reverse mortgage on my house has provided most of my working funds in recent times.

Here are some projects of interest by others.

LED Lighting

   Jim Harrington has been pursuing LED lighting and especially grow lighting with more energy than I've had for it for a couple of years. Jim's philosophy is to use all the "off the shelf" parts he can find, use them in innovative ways, and build only what he has to. (The spring being unusually warm, I got a good garden going outdoors and am ahving early crops without needing lights. To continue into fall and winter, however, I'll need to expand my own grow light selection. I have the components!)
 
L: A 30 Watt red-blue plant growth LED emitter, mounted on a heatsink. This stays pretty cool.
A 260 watt solar panel and batteries are used to make 24 volts for red/blue 'sunlight' indoors,
and to extend the day into the evening.
If used without a diffuser, it should be mounted so one can't look directly at the emitter.
R: Jim's ring light shown previously, growing some small but good looking heads of lettuce.


The leaf lettuce has been getting tall and spindly - a sign it doesn't have enough light.
A new second ring light (R) has a more powerful LED strip - 30 watts instead of 10,
for greater light intensity.

Electric Car J1772 Charger Adapter

   Eric Jenkins has put together an adapter to plug his 1981 Bradley GTX Electric car into a 'modern' J1772 style car charging port. His charger was already 240 volts, so it just needed the 'dryer' socket, J1772 plug, and components to tell the charging station the car was plugged in.

   He's lucky to be able to plug in there. Plugging into a regular outlet, one gets hassles. "We don't allow plugging into our regular outlets!" or "You can't run an extension cord across a sidewalk." These spurious objections have been at the very same buildings where thousands of dollars have been spent putting in the 'special' charging stations for vehicles that can use a lot more electricity to charge for free.
   I've been complaining that they put in no neutral pin on the J1772 charging system, and there's a 'ground fault' detector, so one can't use the ground as neutral, so the whole thing is useless if you have 120 volt chargers.
   It affects those with handicap scooters, road scooters and e-bikes, too, who could be using these outdoor-safe charging stations if they had 120 volts.
   Someone has said that the thing to do is to make the ground connection elsewhere, like with an alligator clip to the metal on the charging station post itself. Maybe I'll try that sometime.
   Thanks J1772 designers for creating a deficient system that doesn't meet half the real needs out there, and so has needed upgrading from the moment it was put into service!


Rocket Stove

   Rick, a retired plumber I used to work with in the Victoria School District long ago, has in recent years been creating interesting energy products such as solar hot water collectors, gassifiers to run cars from firewood, and a couple of rocket stoves.
   The rocket stove is interesting in that it burns small bits of wood very efficiently. The burner is at the front. It is fed from the top, and burns at the bottom, so if sticks of wood are fed in, they get shorter and shorter, with the bottoms always falling down to the fire level.
   The flame goes through a pipe into the center of the round cylinder at the rear. Air is fed in to burn any remaining smoke at the bottom of the cylinder. (or is it the top?) The warm exhaust air travels to the chimney around the outside.
   By the time it's going out the chimney it's cool and clear of visible smoke. In operation it has a whooshing sound like a rocket.

   The disadvantage compared to a woodstove is that in taking small loads of fuel, it has to be fed quite frequently. There are however some interesting designs of larger partly 'earthenware'/pottery rocket stoves for heating houses on the web and on youtube. The clay holds the heat for hours.



In Passing
(Miscellaneous topics, editorial comments & opinionated rants)

Climate Chaos: Jet streams weaken, cross equator

   Earth's stratospheric jetstreams normally run East to West in four bands of high speed winds: The northern and southern tropical-temperate and temperate-arctic jetstreams. These normally separate the tropical, temperate and arctic climates. Climatologist Paul Beckwith [you tube channel] at the University of Ottawa's Laboratory for Paleoclimatology has done a great video lecture showing how the jetstreams have become weak and chaotic, leading to severe arctic warming, cooling and even glaciers in areas in temperate latitudes (which is probably why some people think there's global cooling rather than warming), and a decrease in seasonal temperature variations. They have never become chaotic like this or crossed the equator before since weather records have been kept, except in the last couple of years. He says we may even have a "blue water event" (meaning little or no sea ice, I presume) in the arctic ocean by August this year. (The real-time maps of winds at various altitudes can be found at a website called earth.nullschool.net for those interested.)
   He describes many strange and record setting weather phenomena. He ends with some important conclusions: "There are very strange things happening on planet Earth. I can't stress how important this is to the climate system. You can look at my other youtube videos to help understand this better. We need to declare a climate change emergency. We're going to have massive hits to the food supply. We're going to have massive geopolitical unrest."

   Beckwith doesn't mention causes of the problem in this video. The obvious main cause is the somehow invisible elephant in the room, the USAF's nearly worldwide, highly energetic 'geoengineering' program: the spraying of chemicals like coal ash high in the sky from jets, and blowing away the ionosphere with mobile HAARP machines mounted on ships, trains or wherever.
   Globally, old records for heat, drought, and flooding are being broken almost daily. And the sprayed chemical 'fertilizers' cause huge algal blooms. As the algae dies, its decay leaves oxygen depleted water. In Florida this week an algal bloom so bad it's "like guacamole" has prompted declaration of a state of emergency. (It's bound to lead to some marine mass die-offs.)

   Unfortunately, looking at one of his other videos, it seems Beckwith sees aerosol spraying as part of a solution, not the problem. Reduced sunlight penetration however is countered and more by the insulating effect the particles seem to have on the atmosphere, reducing cooling off at night. Perhaps they reflect infra-red heat back to the ground just as well as they reflect sunlight. And he ignores too the many deleterious side effects: droughts, flooding, ocean acidification, algal blooms and die-offs. It looks like the people deciding to do these things have little real idea of the effects of what they're doing, just academic theories, and see these disasters as reasons to redouble their efforts, not as results of their programs. But why have the problems so rapidly become so much worse, exactly since they started them?

   The one and only real and effective solution is obvious: to stop polluting the air by switching from burning fossil fuels to electric transportation and other equipment. Along with electric cars, if we electrify and modernize the railroads it would eliminate most of the air traffic, especially for freight. Electric CNC farming machines would eliminate most of the petroleum use on farms. Once the fossil fuel burning is greatly reduced, everything then will solve itself. Anything else is essentially a distraction, not a solution.

   Seeing the effects on the jetstreams, and the arctic meltings and methane releases, I can't imagine weather patterns returning to normal in anything less than a decade once all the problem activities (meaning at this point the geoengineering much more than fossil fuel use) are stopped. Possibly it will take much longer - even centuries.

My amateur rendition of a panorama of chemtrails over Victoria BC, July 2nd 2016,
whipped up by gusty winds into artistic brushstroke shapes ... somewhat reminiscent
of the odd, broken patterns of the jetstreams around the world map. Some hours
earlier these formations had been more a pattern of straight lines, with a giant "X"
right over the town.

Mass Animal Die-Offs

   Perhaps you've seen a mass die-off or two of sea life in the news. It's horrifying to think of the bulk of a whole population of starfish, sea lions or marine birds being wiped out of the ocean in one fell swoop. But even this gives little hint of the scale of what's happening. Whatever anyone thinks about a site called "end-times-prophecy.org", I got a link to their page about mass fish and animal die-offs. It staggers the imagination! There are more mass die-offs happening around the globe than there are days, and many days have 2 or 3 mass dieoff stories - there were even a couple of 5 story days. The list for 2016 alone goes on and on. Each one has a link back to an original news article from a reputable source. http://www.end-times-prophecy.org/animal-deaths-birds-fish-end-times.html One starts to get a disquieting picture of life, especially marine and aquatic life but not limited to that, dying off at a furious pace all over the planet.
   While some of the mass deaths have specific known causes, I have no doubt that the bulk of the carnage is directly or indirectly attributable to the various effects of 'geoengineering'.

Speculation to Help Fuel High Food Costs

   "Trade Genius" Bob Kudla on Next News Network, said that speculators are latching onto what is turning into a bad crop year because of various climate anomalies in widespread areas including China, Europe and the USA. They are buying up futures contracts on crops so that if there are scarcities, they will have control of the remaining stocks. This by itself (even where there's enough to go around) will drive prices even higher over the coming fall and winter as they hope to take big profits from their speculations - at the expense of the eating public. One more reason to stock up some keepable foods! And probably one more reason we need to change some of the ways the world does business!

Precious Metals Price Breakout

   Many analysts have been saying over and over for several years that as things get worse, having real property - things of value like precious metals in your own hands - will be almost the only way to preserve your wealth through the chaotic period they see coming. People seem to be catching on, and the precious metals are now rapidly climbing in price. Silver went up by over a dollar on Canada day (Friday July 1st) alone, from about 18.60 to 19.75 $US. (It was about 14 $US at the start of the year, and it's well over 20 as of Sunday night.) There may be 'pull-backs', or they may just keep climbing. But in the coming months, or year, or maybe two or even three, they and all commodities will reach prices that will make us all gape in awe, as that vast pool of paper money printed in the last decade and more all chases desperately after the same quantity of real goods, causing hyperinflation and finally complete loss of trust in and the value of fiat currency. Venezuela is a great example of what happens.

Very Hot Drinks Linked to Esophageal Cancer - Coffee is good for you

   WHO's (World Health Org.) IARC branch (Int. Assoc. for Research of Cancer) has linked very hot drinks, drunk at over 65-70°c, with cancer, in particular esophageal cancer. The trouble is as you'd suspect: the hot liquid burns the lining of the throat, causing damage over and over as the drinker makes a habit of it. Hah! I always thought that, surely, scalding hot drinks couldn't be good for you!

   In the same RT.com article, IARC looked at over 1000 studies that all show coffee has no apparent link to any cancer. (Unless of course it's too hot, I presume.) In fact moderate coffee drinking reduces incidence of death from diabetes, heart diseases and neurological diseases. No mention of whether that was with or without cream and or sugar. Or whether it was Arabica or Robustica coffee (Low or High caffeine coffee subspecies). Perhaps it makes no difference?

Screw for Denmark!

   Birth rates in the developed world, which mostly means where white people live, have been below replacement values for decades now. But in some parts of the "undeveloped" world, birth rates are still very high. Now a national government has pointed out the obvious: that if white people don't start having more kids, they will have to let in the hordes of surplus people from places where they have foolishly, thoughtlessly, ignorantly or otherwise failed to control their population growth. White people will soon be in the minority even in North America and Europe where they have been the bulk of the populace. In the USA as of last year, white babies became a minority. Will this trend increase until there are no more white people? What will happen to advancing culture? While the white races need perhaps more than most to curtail reproduction of their defective, degenerate and antisocial stocks, I can't see the submergence of their - our - genetic and creative potentials as being a good thing.

   The Danish government has started the "Screw for Denmark!" advertising campaign pointing out that Denmark as a people and culture will vanish unless they start having enough children to keep schools open and to support the present population when they are elderly. "Take a vacation. Go to Paris. Go to the beach. Have a good time. Relax. Have some good sex." And the campaign, not a year old, in combination with local campaigns, is having its effect: the birth rate has gone up. Denmark's schools are to stay open.

'Screw for Denmark' sex campaigns produce baby boom in months ...

https://www.rt.com/news/345499-denmark-baby-boom-sex/

A racy ad campaign, started only nine months ago, has really hit the spot for Denmark's campaign for more baby-making. The country now ...

A Danish TV ad for the campaign ends in English with "Do It for Denmark!"


   I will also remark along these lines, that as I saw the reduced birthrates here in the 1990s and closings of a few schools here and there, and a reduction in immigration from other parts of Canada, I was relieved. I expected life would get easier, without the unrelenting pressure from more and more people competing for the land and resources, without the need for never-ending urban expansion. It seemed our problems could be solved. Homelessness would end. Traffic would stop getting heavier and heavier. Competition would decrease and co-operation and leisure time would increase, and the three core values of social sustainability could take root: an improving quality of life, equality, and opportunities for fulfilling, growing living for all. Could it be that some sort of Utopian living standard for all was within sight?
   Instead our governments, Canada and BC, simply started letting in more and more immigrants from ever more overpopulated lands, and life has kept getting harder and harder for everyone. This is partly the fault of the western unsustainable debt-based financial system, which relies on an ever-expanding economy borrowing ever-expanding debt to avoid deflationary debt collapse. It can't permit a stable population and economy! Chaotic as its fall will be, no one will miss it after it's gone.

BREXIT

   A European Union is a fabulous idea - even an inevitability - but the structure of the present organization was very badly thought out. There's no one in overall charge, and an expanding, corrupt and overpaid autocratic bureaucracy has grown up from which there is no democratic appeal. The European central bank and European Commission (not to mention the IMF), out of harmony with real needs and again with no appeal process, dictate to nations what they shall do. We see the disasters they've made of Cypress and Greece, apparently with more countries to follow those into the abyss.
   Near the end of June, the people of Britain voted to disassociate their land from this costly, corrupt autocracy. I looked on Google Earth, and there is already to be seen a wide channel of water between Britain and the rest of Europe. By autumn, barring a second and contrary vote, they should be well out into the mid Atlantic.
   Having retained their British Pound currency, they are in a much better position to leave than most European nations. (I still remember then prime minister John Major keeping them out, saying the Euro currency was "deeply flawed" in concept. Apparently he was right.)

A War Would Have No Winners

   In the past, various nations, or more usually their leaders, have agitated for and started wars. In prehistoric times, genetically unprogressing, unfit or degenerate groups, sometimes hardly more than animals (which we did evolve from, after all), could perhaps be annihilated by savage war, genetically improving the overall human population. In ancient times, city states, and then empires could be built by military expansion - but by then usually to the detriment of the general civil population of the empire, conquerors as well as the vanquished. In the 19th and 20 centuries, wars became more and more devastating, each one costing millions, then tens of millions, of lives. Even in the limited Middle East wars millions have died and tens of millions have been displaced, becoming refugees from bombed ruins that used to be cities, now with nowhere to go.
   Wars escalate. If there was ever another major war, casualties might be numbered in the billions, and might even include everyone. If not, there would still be devastation everywhere with major portions of the globe rendered uninhabitable long into the uncharted future. Some in the ruling circles in the USA think they can "win" against Russia with a sudden nuclear strike. Even if they got exactly their way, and the largest country in the world was wiped off the map without firing a successful shot in reply (more than unlikely), execution of this plan would still probably doom us all to a painful, lingering death by gradual but unrelenting radiation poisoning.
   And if by some miracle the rest of the world could somehow carry on? What, exactly, would have been won by utterly destroying the object of the attack? Booty? Poisoned Lebensraum for an overpopulated America? How absurd! The nations need each other for many reasons. The planet is too small to toss them away and make it smaller.
   Yet the madmen in charge especially in the USA's "military-financial complex" continually agitate and provoke for war and turmoil, and to forcefully quell antagonism toward such programs at home by lies and repression. Journalist Pepe Escobar calls the USA "The Empire of Chaos" since that is about all they have been leaving in the wake of their aggressions for quite some time now. Now warships are sent into the Black Sea and huge wargames are held in eastern Europe within sight of Russia's borders "to promote peace". Warships are sent into the South China Sea to "assert freedom of the sea lanes" (or however exactly it was phrased). Such doublespeak now being heard heard again and again sounds just like Nazi propaganda from shortly before World War II, or from George Orwell's book 1984. Predictably Russia and China have reacted by building and strengthening their defenses. Russia has created some fearsome new and advanced weapon systems. Would China be building islands and turning them into military bases if it didn't feel threatened?
   The USA 15 years ago didn't have an enemy in the world. The "military-financial complex" was threatened by irrelevance. Enemies had to be created out of thin air to justify it greedily gobbling up over one half of the entire US budget! And despite the vast expenditures, the US is now being outclassed in weapons systems.

   Devious intrigues and war are no longer realistic options for solving anything, if they ever were. Let us pray. Surely the disastrous plans of these evildoers will never be played out!
NO MORE WARS!
NO MORE WARS!
NO MORE WARS!

   But words are only the start. People must regain control over our societies, not hand power over to elected officials who aren't working in our interests, or who at least have many conflicting interests besides ours to contend with. HandsOnDemocracy.org again has concepts for doing that.

Dimetrodon: Contrary Statements?

   In looking up something not closely related in Wikipedia I ended up at Dimetrodon and found a statement diametrically opposed to the one I read earlier on another web site (which one, unfortunately I didn't note), which said that bone microanatomy indicated a low metabolic rate in dimetrodon and edaphosaurus, which would be consistent with their being aquatic or amphibious. [all quotes below are from Wikipedia]
   "The exact lifestyle of Dimetrodon (amphibious to terrestrial) has long been controversial, but bone microanatomy supports a terrestrial lifestyle,[50] which implies that it would have fed mostly on land, on the banks, or in very shallow water."

   Of course, that still doesn't preclude them being amphibious, and the author admits it's controversial, but it seems like the opposite conclusion to what I read on the other website. It's also still true that there weren't any seed plants yet, so there probably were mostly only sparse bugs and fern leaves to eat except in and around the water. (Not that there weren't some very large bugs!)
   There was also a statement that I had been unable to find about the young, a mild contradiction to what I had been led to infer before that they may perhaps not have been found: "Although some Dimetrodon species could grow very large, many juvenile specimens are known." But might the eggs still be laid in the water?
   Now that I think about it, there's one thing I hadn't considered, and that's live birth. Even some fish give live birth, so it doesn't seem impossible some amphibians might have it or once had it.

   Hadn't I read the Wikipedia article on Dimetrodon? That seems amazing considering how many things I looked up on the subject. Might those parts even have been added since I wrote my piece last month, perhaps as a refutation of it? Most likely I somehow missed it. But other topics and species the search led me to still seemed to me to validate my original conclusion, that all the Permian inhabitants were amphibians until near the end of the period. Also that there seemed to be stronger agreement - or at least more and more evidence - for this than I had realized. For Dimetrodon and Edaphosaurus to have been reptiles in that early time seems more and more out of place.
   In other articles I found that "Reptiliomorpha" happened to potentially include amphibians from the Carboniferous and Permian, not just reptiles.

   "The name Reptiliomorpha was coined by Professor Gunnar Säve-Söderbergh in 1934 to designate amniotes and various types of late Paleozoic tetrapods that were more closely related to amniotes than to living amphibians. In his view, the amphibians had evolved from fish twice, with one group composed of the ancestors of modern salamanders and the other, which Säve-Söderbergh referred to as Eutetrapoda, consisting of anurans (frogs), amniotes and their ancestors, with the origin of caecilians [modern limbless amphibians living akin to worms or snakes] being uncertain. Säve-Söderbergh's Eutetrapoda consisted of two sister-groups: Batrachomorpha, containing anurans and their ancestors, and Reptiliomorpha, containing anthracosaurs and amniotes.[5] Säve-Söderbergh subsequently added Seymouriamorpha to his Reptiliomorpha as well."

   Others disagreed with this theory. In one definition, "Reptiliomorpha" includes only early amphibians - those presumed to be the ancestors of the reptiles.

"Michael Benton (2000, 2004) made it the sister-clade to Lepospondyli, containing "anthracosaurs" (in the strict sense, i.e. Embolomeri), seymouriamorphs, diadectomorphs and amniotes.[4] However, when considered in a Linnean framework, Reptiliomorpha is given the rank of superorder and includes only reptile-like amphibians, not their amniote descendants."

and

"The informal variant of the name, "reptiliomorphs", is also occasionally used to refer to stem-amniotes, i.e. a grade of reptile-like labyrinthodont tetrapods [amphibians or pre-reptiles] that are more closely related to amniotes [reptiles, birds, mammals] than they are to lissamphibians [modern amphibians], but are not amniotes themselves; the name is used in this meaning e.g. by Ruta, Coates and Quicke (2003)."

[My italics]

   Like I said, by getting into the whole subject, one is entering a labyrinth.

Huge Beetle

One day in a parking lot I found this huge beetle, about 2" long, with huge 'antlers'. It didn't like water. I'm guessing it's some kind of forest beetle, at home under the bark in rotten douglas fir logs. Full marks if anybody knows what it is.

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Electric Hubcap Motor Systems - Electric Transport

Electric Hubcap motor, Chevy Sprint & Variable Transmission

Changing to a Sprint Gearbox - Just the box?

   Instead of trying to find parts that didn't need lubrication, it seemed to me for a while it might be better to enclose everything in a box with gear oil. The best box, if I could use it, would be one made for the car.

   I had bought a Sprint/Metro manual transmission at an auto wrecker some time ago. I had been unable to disassemble it, but I thought I would try again. Perhaps if I removed all the convoluted clutter of gears, shafts and levers, there would be room for one planetary gear on one shaft, with the slipping mechanism sticking out one end and the motor on the other, and a chain to the enclosed differential.
   On the 4th I borrowed a large gear puller from AGO and put it on the gear that wouldn't budge. That and a propane torch heating it until the bearing balls were glowing finally got it loose. In the convoluted mechanism were a number of split pins and things that had to be punched out. I finally realized that the gears weren't coming out until each piece of the maze of shifter parts that connected to the gearshift lever was removed first.
   I got most of the rest disassembled (besides what I'd done long ago) in about an hour and a half. Then I got to the rod that connected to the shift lever. In a deep recess was a bolt holding a piece on the end of the shaft that kept the whole rod from sliding out. I loosened the bolt, but there just wasn't quite enough room to pull it out, and its end still stuck in a bit and kept the rod from coming out. How had they done that? I finally had to give up. My mind had a picture of the recess as being a bump in the casting on the outside. The next day I finally decided I would drill a hole to pull the bolt out through. But when I looked on the outside, there was a sheet metal plate cover over the inside recess, held by 3 bolts. Duh! The bump in the casting I was thinking of was elsewhere. So having wasted an hour, I removed the plate, the offending bolt, and the lever on the shifter shaft, and got the shaft out. Total time now was doubled to 3 hours, over one simple little thing. Such is mechanics!

   There was over 5" of length available. If I put a planetary gear on either of the original shaft positions, it could only be 4" in diameter. If I made a new hole at the center of the space, it could be 5" diameter. The biggest chain sprocket I could put on the differential was just 6" instead of 8". That would mean a pretty small sprocket. It would have to fit beside the ring gear rather than over it, adding an inch to the length. So the planetary could then be only 4" long instead of 5". Unless I punched out the whole end of the transmission. Well, that could be done!


A New Solar System: The Two-Sun Planetary Gear?

   I looked at all those gears on two shafts, some of them spinning freely and others fixed to the shafts, and wondered if there might be some way some of them could be turned into a planetary gear, but it didn't look possible. There may be some way, but it really needs a ring gear with the teeth on the inside, and a ring of mobile planet gears with their shafts circulating freely, meshing between the other two.
   Or was there some other way? Let's see... If a shaft had one fixed gear and one floating gear to replace the sun and ring gear, one might contrive to put on two concentric "washers" on bearings, that could circulate around the main shaft. Between the two washers there would be short shafts with double gears affixed to them. One gear of these pairs would mesh with the fixed gear and the other with the floating gear. This would constitute a planetary gear. And all the gears would have outer teeth, no inside ring. The two gears must be different diameters to match the different main gears, and the ratio is any desired ratio except one-to-one, but preferably substantially different. Whatever the ratio, the freely rotating "planet pairs" assembly will need axial stiffness beyond that needed for the regular type.
   Then, let's see... one end could be driven by the motor. That could be considered either the "ring gear", if it was the larger one, or the "sun gear", if it was the smaller one. But we want the slipping mechanism to be on the smaller "sun" gear. Or on the "planet'. Now... how do we get the gear elements connected to where they need to connect? Concentric shafts? Slipping pulley inside the housing? If two connections were internal, it *could* be all mounted on one solid shaft with a bearing at each end. The possibilities, the possibilities!

   Wow, I just might save that couple of thousand dollars that I was about to spend on a planetary gear after all! Time to give the whole thing a lot of thought! And see which gears can mate with which in there. There were in fact 5 pairs of gears which mated on the two shafts, one fixed and one floating on each pair, all of them always turning on both shafts, while only one pair is engaged for any of the 5 speeds. (No wonder transmissions gobble up 30% of the power put into them!) Reverse has a slightly different arrangement with a third gear connecting across the two shafts and changing the direction from the others. It's also straight ("spur") gears instead of helical, giving that typical "backing up" sound when in use.

   Of course, there could only be one "planet" instead of several, made from one pair of gears. Well, they're the same gears that were singly driving the car before. But there wasn't room for them inside the case if the planet had to circulate around the main shaft. The diameter became 6" or more. I'd have to hack up the case. Well, sobeit.

   I occurs to me that surely people must have thought of this arrangement before, probably many times. There are lots of people with far more devious mechanical minds than mine! They should be easier to make - why have we never seen such gears? On the other hand, there was that guy that said he worked at GM's main plant in the 1960s-70s, who said the engineers there would cry over all the patents for improved things that GM had bought up and stuffed into the drawers, which they weren't allowed to use in designing new vehicles. They might have even had the variable PGTC before. So much priceless technology has been held back from us! Well, the internet is putting an end to that.
 

   (Are those "planetary" gear names still appropriate? Well, "ring gear" never did fit with "sun and planets". Maybe it should have been called the "Kuiper belt gear" or the "Oort Cloud"? We could perhaps call this the "double star" planetary gear?)

The two shafts from inside the transmission. Most of the gears have been removed from the output shaft,
leaving just first and fifth. For all 5 forward gears, the gears always rotate against each other, but only
one gear selection at a time has both gears locked onto both shafts. Helical gears have higher losses than
straight 'spur' gears such as the reverse gears, but run quieter. All these ever-churning gears doubtless explains
much of the 30% losses of a typical manual transmission. A large straight gear of the lower shaft for reverse
(not shown) doesn't quite touch the small one shown. A gear connecting between them is moved into position
for reverse, causing the output shaft to rotate the opposite direction.
Between 3rd and 4th on the input shaft a sliding engager can be seen. In its current position pushed to the right,
it connects the brownish fixed ring to the third gear. Slid to far left, it would lock 4th to the shaft instead.
In the center both 3rd and 4th spin freely allowing some other gear selection. There is a similar engager
between first and second on the output shaft, and one just for 5th at the left end.


   As a side note, I've been told now and then that "fourth gear goes straight through from the motor to the drive shaft, so it gives better fuel economy", and that fifth gear is an "overdrive". That has always puzzled me. Certainly in the Sprint manual transmission 4th and 5th were just two of five pairs of gears continually churning against each other. But then I saw a Youtube video about transmissions, some sort of training film from the 1950s, and they actually did make them like that back then. There was a third shaft, and in fourth, it was disengaged and the engine was indeed coupled straight through to the drive shaft with all the gears disengaged. There usually was no fifth gear. Either the newer way is simpler, smoother or easier to make or to shift, or it has been made the way it is now deliberately to prevent drivers from getting better fuel economy, since it all has been controlled until very recently by "big oil". (Ever notice that vehicles never more than just meet government mandated fuel efficiency standards? They have until recently been worse than in the 1970s.) The way they were once made has become an urban legend that has had no substance since probably the 1950s or early 1960s. But I digress.

Gear Shafts Disassembly

   I wasn't sure how on Earth I was going to get all those gears and things off the transmission shafts without damaging anything in order to re-configure it into a "double sun planetary gear". On the 6th it occurred to me to see what others have been doing along those lines on youtube. First there was a "Snap-On" gear puller that looked better than anything I'd seen before. But I wasn't confident it would do the job. I kept thinking that the 20 ton hydraulic press was the right tool... but I couldn't see how to fit things into it to press in the right places. The tiny space between each gear was a big problem for inserting anything solid between them.
   And I noticed that some of the fixed gears weren't pressed onto the shaft, but appeared to actually be part of the same piece of metal. That would make it even more tricky! No way to take those off at all. But that could be accommodated since the mating 'freespinning' gear for each could be removed.

   I started thinking of a large tube that would hold the whole shaft complete with gears, then a couple of pieces of metal across the top to hook under the end bearing and first gear to be removed. (They were too close together to do separately.) Finally I took the shaft up to the press. Hmm, the fattest gear did after all fit inside the bottom rest. Okay, forget the tube! And the blocks that came with the press had triangles cut into the centers as if just for this sort of thing. Okay, we had the pieces! I put it all in, and a cardboard box 'cushion' under in case the whole shaft fell down, and started pressing. When it hit about 5 tons there was a sudden bang. The gear and end bearing had come loose! Perhaps I could do the next two gears at once, too, since it would be really hard to get between them. I found some thinner (3/8") slabs that would fit and pressed again. Again it banged loose suddenly, at 4 or 5 tons. The two fixed gears I'd now pressed off weren't just a press fit. They fit on the shaft via splines. I got the large end of the other shaft apart easily enough, but I couldn't budge the small end. It seemed they just had to be a press fit, or else how had they been fitted? In the press I cracked the first gear teeth. Okay, that was far enough on that! They could stay on, and I certainly wasn't going to use first gear.

Death and Reconfiguration... then Simplification

In order to turn these into a "double sun planetary gear", one whole shaft would have to be able to revolve around the other.
This certainly wouldn't make for a smaller gear package than the regular planetary gear formation.

   Once they were apart I started thinking of how best this "double sun" planetary gear might be fit together. It looked like I could use 3rd and 4th gears. Both shafts had one fixed gear and one floating. Per the plan, the gears on one of the shafts had to be locked together. Easily done by putting on its gear shifting parts. Then, the planets shaft had to poke out one end to attach the motor to. (Or the larger sun gear end, depending on configuration.) That was easier said than done. But what if I used 5th gear, which was mounted beyond the bearings, outside the main case, with 3rd or 4th? There was access! Oops, that was the one gear the rotating "planets" shaft couldn't use, for that very reason.
   But was there some way to do it without one shaft having to revolve around the other like a planet?

   On the 8th I spent the evening watching videos about variable torque converters on Youtube. They weren't looking very promising.

   Finally one at midnight jogged my memory, that long ago I had noted that a differential gear had 3 elements and was in that sense similar to a planetary gear. It was even a 1 to 1 planetary gear, or 2 to 1 from the drive if one 'wheel' was stopped. How badly did a "pavement only" electric car need both front wheels driven? I rejected the idea out of hand when I originally thought of it, but what if one drive axle was cut off to a stub and a slipping pulley mounted on it? The differential would become the variable torque converter. One could contrive to put in a 3 to 1 reduction chain drive with a 36 tooth (6", using #50 chain) sprocket on the differential and a 12 tooth one right on the motor - or on the top shaft of the transmission housing. That way one would have the original housing containing only the top shaft and differential with a chain, and the torque conversion slipping pulley on the outside at the bottom. With no slip the motor would do 3000 RPM for... wait! with one shaft stopped, the wheel side would go twice as fast, halving the reduction ratio. So it should be 6 to 1 to give 3000 RPM on the motor for 1000 RPM on the wheel. That would then be a 6 tooth, 1" sprocket on the top. That would be a pretty tiny sprocket! Or it might have to be 5 or 7 teeth, because there'll be no way to adjust the chain length to eliminate slack except by changing the sprocket sizes. But really the smallest sprocket might be about 12 teeth. It would need a 20mm weld-on center core.

   It occured to me that I do have two differentials since I bought the manual transmission, but I didn't see an easy way to employ the second one so both wheels could be driven. So I decided to try the single wheel idea. Also, I note that some original manufacturers' car transmissions do in fact employ a chain drive to the differential instead of gears, and it's supposed to be better. You just don't know it's there because it's inside the transmission housing. I do have concerns:

1. The whole differential spins, and takes the full force of the drive, but usually the four bevel gears inside it only turn slowly, when turning left or right or if one tire is a bit smaller than the other (eg, different tire or underinflated). With this system, they will be constantly spinning except when the wheel and slip pulling are both turning the same speed. They just might wear out rather quickly. I'll take that chance.

2. With just 2 to 1 speed increase, will it have enough torque? It probably will - the original setup had about 3 to 1 slowdown, so that's 6 times faster and so will probably be more like 120 foot-pounds instead of 20. If the motor speed is here reduced by 6 to 1 (increasing its torque 6 times) hopefully it'll be far more than adequate. (Given a constant motor speed and torque, the pulley will slow down as the wheel/car speeds up.)

3. Driving the car with just one front wheel. One rear wheel seems "more okay" somehow. I know I didn't much like it when one rear brake wasn't working in the Mazda, but I still drove it that way for a couple of years until I found that was why it was pulling sideways a bit. But acceleration is more gradual than braking sometimes is, and the other 3 wheels won't tend to skid even if the driven one does, hence it's much less critical.

4. If the feel of the car is acceptable driving just one front wheel, some inspector might regardless say it can't be driven on the street. That would be really distressing!

   But the whole system is so fantastically simple compared to anything else, with so few parts to buy, I just have to try it. It'll be a whole big transmission case with almost nothing in it! If it doesn't have the torque I'll find out soon enough. I think it will. I'll soon know how one front wheel drive works out. Assuming that's okay I'll license it and find out if the differential busts after 500 miles and I have to have the car towed home, or if it'll still be working just fine 5000 miles later and beyond. I suspect everything will be fine.

   The next morning (9th) I went out and looked at the car. If I jammed up the upper planetary gear or put on a shaft coupling, the motor would drive the chain to the differential directly with the present housing and not much change. If I then removed the drive shaft to the right wheel, I could put on a short stub (spare CV drive shaft end) to attach the slipping pulley to. Simple! It wouldn't solve the lubrication problems, but it would be the fast way to get the car going.
   Then came the nitty-gritty of the slipping pulley. In looking at it, the shaft would have to be 6" long for the pulley to clear the mountings, and then I suddenly realized it would have to be about 10" or more long to get it past the motor and the flywheel, or they'd hit. And that would be with any of the available housings, unless they were arranged to have a considerable space between the motor and the transmission to accommodate the pulley. If I used the left wheel instead, there was lots of room right by the housing, even for a 12" pulley, so that was the choice. The whole tensioning rope and cable arrangement would of course have to be remounted however I did it. That arrangement only applied to my housing. The original one stuck out 6" past the differential on that side, so using mine was again the choice for a prototype.

   As a side note, the first 12" pulley I'd bought for a flywheel was about 9 pounds. The second one, the double pulley, was only 11 pounds. I had thought it would be heavier.

Sticking Brake: Half the Problem All Along!

   Well, enough writing; the course was clear... Off with the left wheel! [4 hours later:] While I had it apart, I knew the left front brake was sticking a bit, so I bought new a caliper and replaced it. (The pads were like new.) I hadn't thought it would make much difference, but Holy Hannah! the car was easier to push! It easily knocked 20 or 30 foot-pounds off the force required to turn the wheels from any position. The sticky brake had been far more of a problem than I had realized. Here I had been blaming what I sort of recognized as extra force all along on "spongy, rough lawn" - and still not recognizing how much extra force it really was. It also doubtless contributed to my erroneous conclusion in 2012 that the torque conversion didn't seem to work until the vehicle was moving.

   I can only think that everything I had been trying in the last couple of months including starting on up-slopes would have worked - if only barely. I just might have dared to insure it and venture out onto the back streets for more testing. (If only there weren't so many steep hills right around here!)

   In fact, some of the various more adventurous torque converter designs like the magnetic impulse one as well as the centrifugal clutch one might have at least moved moved the car!

   (I replaced the right from brake caliper when I bought the car. It was much worse than the left one.)

What Next?

   I had the thought that I could put the drive shaft back on, put everything back the way it was, and try it out again. It would be bound to have better results than before. It would probably do shallower hills okay. Steep ones would probably still be 'out'.

   Onward and upward!, I decided. The left CV drive shaft was now out, and ready to be replaced with a 12" slipping pulley, for which there was just enough clearance all around, on a short axle stub. The present chain drive ratio, 16 teeth driving 48 (just 1.5 to 1 reduction if the slipping gear was stopped), would do unless proven otherwise.

   There were four main tasks to accomplish:

1. Mount the 12" pulley on a shaft that would stick out from the left side of the differential. This I did on the 10th in the late morning. I found the lower shaft from the disassembled transmission seemed to have the right spline for the differential, 2nd one in. So I cut the end off. It didn't go in easily, and then I remembered that as a gear spline, the gear had been a press fit rather than an easy insert. Thus the spline was subtly different. I didn't want to press it in with tons of force - I'd never get it out again! But it went in a little way easily, 4 or 5 mm. Good enough; I would use it that way.
   Then I milled out an "H" taper-lock shaft bushing (the pulley center) from 1-1/8" shaft to 30mm to fit the next flat face on the shaft, which was about the right distance out. I left the rest of the shaft sticking out for now instead of cutting it off (keep options open?), and I screwed on the pulley. (In fact, I was rather distressed about having to cut off the one end, but I didn't see any way around it.)
   As there would be nothing to hold the shaft in the differential except the tensioning rope on the pulley, I decided to add a couple of big retaining clips, at the top and bottom of the pulley, so it couldn't slide out regardless. I made one for the top. The rope 1/2 way stay could double as the bottom clip.

2. Connect the cable and a spring to pull the rope. The line-up wasn't simple and straight now. I figured out and made a mounting bracket in the afternoon. While the setup was less than ideal in the way it routed and bent the cable, it was simple used some parts of the previous mounting. And it solved the problem without (as I had feared) having to add a thin rope and pulleys to rout the pulling force.

3. Mount the tensioning rope. It needed the 1/2 way stay at the bottom, the metal eyes in the ends, and a longer rope for the 12" pulley. I got these in on the afternoon of the 11th.

4. Attach the motor via some sort of shaft connector. I'm not sure joy couplings are good for that much torque. For the first tests, I'll just put in some bits to jam the previous planetary gear and use it as the link. (Especially seeing I haven't been able to get the pressed-on sun gear off the motor yet.) I remembered having trouble jamming the gear and I found in TE News #98 I had made 3 pieces of shiny steel to make a clamp. (It seems so long ago!) I couldn't find them and came up with another arrangement.

   I tried it out before supper. The shaft with the pulley popped out of the socket, 2 or 3 times, preventing an effective test run. It obviously needed something to hold it on securely. All I could think of to do was to put a bolt into the end of the shaft, with a washer that wouldn't go through the hollow gear in the differential, so the bolt held it from popping out. The space inside the differential was cramped. I could get a 1/4" or 5/16" bolt to go into the gear, but not with the washer on it. (In fact, a 5/16" bolt would probably need its hex head ground thinner.) I decided it would have to be a washer with a slot in one side: put in the shaft with the bolt sticking out the end, slip the slotted washer onto the bolt from the side, and then tighten it.
   I had put some beer on to brew on the 6th, and it was overdue for bottling, so I spent much of the 12th on that. The bulk of the time making beer, it seems - several hours - is spent washing, rinsing, sanitizing and again rinsing bottles, then carefully measuring sugar into each bottle. Siphoning in the beer from the fermenter and clamping the lids on the bottles is the least of the process! The innocent looking little beer kit from a grocery store made 23 liters, which filled a lot of bottles. I used Britta filtered water. Everyone thought it was great beer!



   Before dark I got the shaft and pulley from the car. I removed the upper retaining clip, but found the lower one was quite effective. It would have been a pain to remove and replace, so I cut it off with the angle grinder to pull the pulley and shaft off. With a bolt holding the shaft in, the clips were presumably superfluous. The next day I drilled a hole in the center of the shaft on the lathe with a center drill and then regular drills, and tapped it for 1/4" 20 TPI. I cut a slot in a washer and put the whole thing on. This held it firmly. (I worried about the bolt eventually unscrewing.)
   The results were disappointing. The car would hardly move. If the rope slipped on the pulley, it just slipped without vehicle motion. If it didn't slip much, the motor was overloaded. The rope soon had smeared melt marks along it from getting too hot. (The original got a few eventually, but nothing like this.) After trying a few adjustments and not getting very far, the rope actually broke. The previous arrangement, tho it had been limited to 20 foot-pounds, had worked much better.

   The first question now was, why didn't it work? With a 2 to 1 speed-up instead of a 3 to 1 slow-down, it should according to my theory now be turning faster and needing less torque. OTOH, the slipping was now on the wrong side of the 3 to 1 chain reduction from the motor, so 3 times slower and 3 times more torque. (Or is it 1.5 times slower since its speed is doubled if the car isn't moving?) And being that the torque converter was the differential, it wasn't possible to move it to the other side.

   The second question, seeing it didn't seem to work, was: what next? Seeing the original planetary gear did work, just not quite well enough, I suppose that I should try other similar configurations. Whether to spend 2000 or 2600 $ on one with my budget in hopes that it might work better, seems a touchy point. In lieu of that, perhaps the most practical ideas are to reconfigure the original gear and to try the other planetary gear I got in the same Chrysler transmission gear set.

   If I turned the original planetary gear around, would it be better as I had thought... or worse? It would of course take a lot of rebuilding to reverse the planetary. But maybe not too much? I could take the motor shaft with the sun gear on it and make that the output shaft. A new motor shaft could drive the ring gear, with the slipping pulley still on the planets assembly. On the other hand, the sun gear was the fastest-turning one with the lowest torque to control it. It seemed most logical that it should be the slipping gear.

A Missing Link

   On the 14th, it occurred to me that instead of just having the rope slip the pulley to a stop, it could instead connect back to the motor shaft. If the car wasn't moving, the differential's left side was trying to spin 2/3 as fast as the motor. With some optimal pulley ratio, instead of dragging and slowing things down, it would add its derived force to the push of the motor, increasing the torque to itself and to the wheel.
   I had tried to think of ways to do this back in 2012, but the output turned the opposite direction to the input, and it seemed problematic to try and link them together. Likewise the slipping gear turned more slowly than the motor/sun gear, and they were in-line on one shaft. Unless the speed could be 'geared up' somehow in the link, tying them together would still be little better than not. One way would be to put a generator on the slipping element and feed the generated voltage back to the motor - the approach of Toyota Prius and Chevy Volt. It would still take a bigger motor to make that power, and my idea was the minimalist motor and components.

   I had considered that the planetary gear acted like a transistor, with a small force on one 'gate' element controlling large forces flowing between the input and output elements. I discounted the losses involved as being 'minor'. But the rope and pulley got pretty warm in tests, suggesting that it didn't really work that way. I still discounted them because they would decrease as a percentage of speed until the rope didn't slip at higher speeds and lower torques. Now with the differential gear heating up the rope until it melted, I started to reconsider.

   But now the differential gear, the slipping pulley and the motor shaft - in fact, everything - turned the same direction. And there were two shafts. A new way for the torque converter to work started to glimmer in my mind: If the force of the 'slipping' element shaft was mechanically fed back to the driving shaft, the torque would be multiplied based on the speed of the motor and that of the car. I'll use 10 RPM per km/hour as the wheel speed for simplicity. (About right for typical 13" wheels.) Now, if the rope is geared so it tries to drive the motor at 1 to 1 speed when wheel RPM = Rope Pulley RPM = Differential Center RPM (ie, geared up 3 times, to match the gearing down of the chain drive), then, as long as the car speed (wheel RPM) is below 1/3 of the motor speed, the previously wasted energy of the slipping pulley is helping to speed up the motor, increasing its torque. Now that seems more like it!

   I entered some numbers into some tables to help visualize the effect.
Vehicle Speed
(Km/Hr)
 Driven Wheel
(RPM)
 Motor Shaft
(RPM)
 Differential Center
(RPM)
 Differential Left
(RPM)
 Slip/RPM Ratio
Diff.Left/Motor
(Pulleys geared 3:1)
0
 0
 300
 100
 200
 2
10
 100
 300
 100
 100
 1 (No slip)
20
 200
 300
 100
 0 (won't happen)
 -2






0
 0
 1200
 400
 800
 2
10
 100
 1200
 400
 700
 1.75
20
 200
 1200
 400
 600
 1.5
30
 300
 1200
 400
 500
 1.25
40
 400
 1200
 400
 400
 1 (No slip)


   If instead the pulley and rope were geared to 6 to 1 instead of 3 to 1, a different range of values would be applied because the slipping pulley would be pushing the motor until the wheel was turning twice its speed.
Vehicle Speed
(Km/Hr)
 Driven Wheel
(RPM)
 Motor Shaft
(RPM)
 Differential Center
(RPM)
 Differential Left
(RPM)
 Slip/RPM Ratio
Diff.Left/Motor
(Pulleys geared 6:1)
0
 0
 300
 100
 200
 4
10
 100
 300
 100
 100
 2
15
 150
 300
 100
 50
 1 (No slip)






0
 0
 1200
 400
 800
 4
10
 100
 1200
 400
 700
 3.5
20
 200
 1200
 400
 600
 3
30
 300
 1200
 400
 500
 2.5
40
 400
 1200
 400
 400
 2
50
 500
 1200
 400
 300
 1.5
60
 600
 1200
 400
 200
 1 (No slip)


   It seems an odd sort of variable torque converter where the speed of the car is directly proportional to the speed of the motor. But that's "at speed", no slip. If the vehicle is below speed, the 'gear ratio' has increased reduction for inceased torque. Or, put another way, at a given vehicle speed, the motor will run faster and the pulley will slip when more torque is needed.

   If the pulleys were 1.5 to 1 increase to the motor shaft, it would be 2 to 1 at the differential and the motor would drive the shaft freely - the car wheel end wouldn't turn. But what if the pulleys were less than 1.5 to 1? Then it would turn backward, so the motor would be run in reverse. If the pulleys were 1 to 1:

Vehicle Speed
(Km/Hr)
 Driven Wheel
(RPM) (Differ-
ential Right)
 Motor Shaft
(RPM)
 Differential Center
(RPM)
 Differential Left
(RPM)
 Slip/RPM Ratio
Diff.Left/Motor
(Pulleys geared 1:1)
0
 0
 -300
 -100
 -200
 .67
10
 100
 -300
 -100
 -300
 1 (No slip)
20
 200
 -300
 -100
 -400
 1.33 (Won't happen)






0
 0
 -1200
 -400
 -800
 .667
20
 200
 -1200
 -400
 -1000
 .833
40
 400
 -1200
 -400
 -1200
 1 (No slip)

   Here we see lower ratios - relatively high torque conversion - and also that the differential gear will be spinning like mad. Obviously there are adjustments that can be played with in pulley ratios to get different 'gear ratios' for different motor speeds. If the torque increase was insufficient, the pulley could drive the motor shaft at a ratio just slightly faster than the motor was in fact turning, and the torque would be magnified more, with the driven wheel speeding up with more force to a slower final non-slip RPM. The less the pulley set gears up the speed, the more tension the rope can apply to push the motor shaft faster, by however much or little added RPM.

   I note that everything is turning the same direction, and the free end of the differential is spinning fastest. Hence, instead of connecting it to the motor shaft, one might instead tie it to the differential's center, or to the wheel end, with whatever reduction gearing seemed appropriate for that element. However, the only easy place to connect it as it's set up now is to the extended motor shaft via pulleys.

   Anyway, perhaps the originally mistaken concept about the 'low' losses acted as a bridge to help me to persevere until I saw a more solid way through.

How to?

   Adding the pulley set looked surprisingly simple: The outer end of the upper drive shaft linked to the motor shaft almost lined up with the slipping pulley I had just put on. If I simply moved the pulley out a couple of inches on that shaft I hadn't chopped the end off of "to allow future options?", they would be in line. The 12" pulley would be too big, so it would be a matter of buying some new pulleys and "H" taper-lock shaft bushings for them. I might have to turn out the center on one to a metric size again. A troublesome aspect is that the pull will be to the side, and the shaft is only supported at one end, in the differential. I'll probably have to add a support bracket and outside bearing.
   Then the rope would doubtless need an idler pulley and spring, and perhaps one for each direction. Then again, why was I using a rope? Why not a flat belt? I still had the poly-V belt I bought. It would pass for flat, and it was about the right length. The only downside would be finding pulleys. But flat belt pulleys can be made on a lathe! Plus, I had the two 6" pulleys I already made on the 3D printer quite a long time back. That would give the ratios in table 3. It might be worth connecting them because that should certainly drive the car, easily, at "in the yard" testing speeds. I can change them later. And I'll see if they just fall apart. Now about that unsupported shaft...

   When one has pre-made parts not made for one's purpose, they never fit what you want to do. You have to adapt by making your own parts. When I went to put a pulley on the lower shaft, I got a splined piece from the transmission. It fit perfectly onto the splines on the shaft at about the right place to line up with the upper pulley. To my great surprise, its outer splines meshed perfectly with the 3 bolts meant to hold the pulley onto an SDS taper-lock shaft bushing, holding the pulley centered and preventing it from slipping around the shaft. If I took long bolts, I could take a large washer and drill 3 holes, slip it over and put nuts on. I got the bolts... then instead of a huge washer I found an SDS bushing for a 2" shaft. It fit right over everything and the pulley bolted solidly into place via its three pre-threaded holes. WOW! It was virtually as if everything from two totally different sets of parts had been made to fit together. The shaft sagged a bit, and if pulled up came about level. Since the belt would pull it up, I decided it could do for testing without adding the support. That was one major piece of a custom assembly, ready to go in an hour! Remaining were the top pulley and the idler wheel for the center of the belt, which would be attached to the gearshift lever for the variable slip.

   For the top pulley I found a big 3/16" steel ring just slightly too large to fit. I turned it down to fit in the lathe. Then I drilled holes to line up with those in the pulley to attach it with. These were also useful to mount the pulley on a backing plate for the lathe, which allowed me to center it, tighten the bolts, and turn out the inside diameter to fit a 1" I.D. SDS bushing. (My 3-jaw chuck wasn't big enough to grab it by the outside edge.) I almost turned it out too large - you mill and mill and mill, and it takes so long to get near the right size, and suddenly it's past it. But it still fit on the bushing (almost at the fat end) and tightened it onto the 1" shaft from the motor.

   I dug out the old idler wheel I had made to go with these pulleys. (Wow, I found it!) Then I spent 10 days doing Turquoise Energy's annual taxes.

   I was sure the pulleys would need sides to ensure the belt didn't slip off the side. In theory the slightly convex face keeps the belt centered, but with a slipping belt, the forces may be less favorable than with one that doesn't. On the 25th I got some 3/8" thick scrap aluminum pieces from AGO to make the sides from. I checked and it looked like there was indeed room for such thick pieces.
   Jim said to make the center hole with a hole saw, cut off the corners on the bandsaw, and turn the outside on the lathe. I figured, if I was going to use such thick pieces and turn them, I could also shape the insides of the rims so they would guide the belt but not bind, and so that the belt would always touch against rounded edges and not a sharp outer edge. Even if the 3D-printed pulleys fell apart, I could still make new pulleys and use these same edge pieces - as long as I didn't change the pulley size. I bought some hole saws that afternoon... and a 12" combo sheet metal shear, bender and roller that I saw, for 280$. I had almost bought one of those about 15 years ago for 189$, regretted ever since not having done so whenever I worked with sheet metal, and had never seen another one before. Aside from the shopping, I still didn't have any time to work on it until the 29th, and I only got a bit done, and then was diverted again.Hopfully I'll have it together and tested in July.

The pulleys on the differential's left 'drive' shaft and on the motor shaft.
Behind is the idler wheel, and an aluminum circle cut to be one of the
four end plates for the pulleys to retain the belt. (The motor is just
sitting there, not connected or in place. The yellow plate clamps the
planetary gear ring and planets together so it will simply act as a coupler.)
Yet Another Possible New Type of Variable Torque Converter
(The "Double Barrel Torque Converter"?)

   As I considered yet again possible alternatives for making a variable torque converter, I came up with this idea, which just might be practical.
   Some converters use a belt and two split "V" pulleys. The sides of the pulleys can be moved in or out to vary the width of the "V", oppositely to each other, to vary the effective diameter of the pulley against the fixed width belt. This is used in a few cars, where it requires quite a rigid metal segment "V-belt". Lightweight versions with regular V-belts are used in snowmobiles and small motorbikes. I have a hard time thinking it's very efficient. (But I don't have any figures for it.)
   Another one like it has more of a flat belt and two opposite cone shaped pulleys. The belt can be moved toward one side or the other, again reducing one diameter and increasing the other. This one requires the belt to deform side to side as it turns in addition to having the flat face wrapping around the pulleys. I doubt the efficacy of the system and I haven't seen it in use. A demo one I saw on youtube took up quite a lot of space.
   Of course one can't use gears or toothed sprockets in any such variable system, because in varying the sizes there are places where they just won't match up. A sprocket or chain can't have 21.5 teeth. So it has to be some sort of traction type arrangement. If it is employed before a final gearing down to car wheels, hence at a higher RPM and lower torque, a reasonably small flat belt on 'sticky' (as opposed to 'slippery') pulleys stands a good chance of having sufficient traction.

   If one had a relatively (3"?) wide flat drive belt, instead of a round pulley, it could turn on something like a wooden barrel with 'boards' or 'staves' running across it from one end to the other. If those staves were expanded outward, the flexible flat belt would still run around it even tho there would then be gaps between them and the drum would be (eg) a hexagon instead of round. The belt would link to another 'barrel' with expanding boards that contracts and expands oppositely.
   I can think of a couple of basic ways to do this, but since I have no plans for building one at this time, I'll leave the mechanics to the imagination except to note it could work manually, or automatically.
   For automatic, as the input shaft speeds up, its barrel would expand by centrifugal force, and increasing belt tension would force the output barrel to contract. So as the motor speeds up, the 'gear' reduction would decrease, and vice versa. In this case the staves on the output barrel would be spring loaded to spring outward, and would be forced inward as the input pulley expands. These springs would also set the belt tension.

   Once again, if a flat belt isn't slipping, its drive is said to be almost 99% efficient. The belt has to be wide enough and the coupling 'boards' in total broad enough with traction enough that it doesn't slip at any expansion or contraction positions. A wider belt will work with smaller pulleys and vice versa. Probably a good arrangement of such pulleys and belt wouldn't take up any more space than, eg, the split pulleys type of converter. It would need no oil and so could simply be under a cover to keep dust out, and hence the belt or drums could be easily replaced.

http://www.TurquoiseEnergy.com
Victoria BC Canada