Two Stage Mechanical Oscillator Replication

[Gary Hammond]

Here's another update. We're getting closer, but still not there yet.

[Faraday88]

Here's another update. We're getting closer, but still not there yet.

Great! keep up the spirits high.
Best Regards,
Faraday88.

[Gary Hammond]

The two stage oscillator build nearly came to a halt when my grandson took a summer job in construction. And now his school has started again, and he has too heavy of a scholastic load to continue shop class with grandpa.

One thing we discovered was that whenever we got the wheel up to a speed that would produce the maximum swing of the generator magnets for maximum voltage output, it would produce mechanical feed back that soon slowed the wheel down. Then it would speed back up and repeat the process so that it wouldn't maintain a steady speed. We even added more windings to the genny coils and added a second SSG coil and circuit to drive the wheel. Didn't help very much.

So now I'm making a new set of genny coils and magnet setup in a different arrangement to see if I can get more output with less drag. No pictures yet. This is going slow as I'm working on it by myself now

[Gary Hammond]

Last Update

Hi All,

I've spent quite a bit of time making a new 6 coil flux gate generator with 7 magnet pairs. I also beefed up the wooden frame some more and then added some extra length to the swinging magnet arms to get the magnets farther away from the pivot point. A balance weight, two compression springs, and a long tension spring were also needed to give the best results.

I then modified the coil driver circuit. It uses a hall triggered FET to power all three power windings in parallel to increase the speed, power, and constancy of rotation. The former trigger winding is now used as a power recovery winding using a full wave bridge feeding back to the run battery. I also added a diode and capacitor to feed the radiant spikes to a separate charge battery. The batteries can be switched back and forth while running with a 4PDT switch. So even though the circuit requires 900 ma to operate, the combined energy recovery along with battery swapping reduces the total consumption to a much lower value.

The new 5.5 AH batteries shown being used in the video are too small and running at a C6 rate. But over a two and a half hour run the two batteries on the front end were showing only a small loss of total charge. And the battery on the back end being charged by the flux gate generator was holding steady at 12.8 volts while powering a 100 ma LED strip.

Even though this thing is still under unity, it has been a great teaching tool for both me and my grandson. And we did achieve our goal of producing some useful work from the output. I think this device works best as a mechanical oscillator when using the pendulum and extracting slow speed mechanical power off the work end such as encountered when pumping water. I'm now ready to ship it off to my grandson for him to play with and use for show and tell at school.

Here is a video of the machine running. I misspoke in the video when I said the FET was triggering once per revolution. What I meant to say was it only triggers once per magnet pass. With 14 magnets on the wheel at 100 hertz it figures out at 428 RPM and about 7.14 hertz on the output of the genny coils.

[Yaro1776]

Hey Gary,

Excellent thread demonstrating the progression of the mechanical oscillator project along with the extra additions of the SSG wheel/circuit and flux gate generator for battery charging. All in all a clever and well thought out project. Kudos to you my friend and a salute to your mechanical/electrical skills for making this all happen.

Happy New Year to you...

[Gary Hammond]

Hi Yaro,

Thanks Yaro ............ Kudos to you on your research into the YZFM! I've been following your progress even though I don't comment very often.

And Happy New Year back at you.

[Michael Luton]

Very good Gary. Its great how you brought the different tech to work together so well.

[ZPDM]

That is an awesome build Gary! I am very impressed with the workmanship. As I mentioned previously I always wanted to do something like what you did here but wasn't sure if I had the build skills and patience to get such a thing successfully running. Now we know it can be done! Perhaps you sent an e-mail along to Veljko, I bet he would be delighted to see it as well. Just to be sure I understand your previous comment #33, when you added winds to the "genny" coils, the line of vertical coils that the swing arm with its magnet moves past, it braked the wheel so much it would slow down? Again thanks for building this!

[Gary Hammond]

Hi Michael and Paul,

Thank you both for the nice comments.

Just to be sure I understand your previous comment #33, when you added winds to the "genny" coils, the line of vertical coils that the swing arm with its magnet moves past, it braked the wheel so much it would slow down?

The design was wrong for what we were trying to accomplish with the coils. There were only two coils and four magnets without enough travel to get a flux reversal in the cores in straight line motion. Plus we had the air gap so small trying to boost the voltage that the magnets would sometimes grab the cores and stop the swinging. I robbed that setup from the previous rotating flux gate generator I built to run from my attraction motor. When rotating, it worked very well and gave two flux reversals each revolution. I've now put it back on the attraction motor where it belongs.

Another problem was the original SSG drive circuit/coil arrangement wasn't powerful enough to keep the speed steady. There is some mechanical feed back to the wheel from the work end. It's all a delicate balancing act to get it running somewhat steady. And by making a new genny coil setup with six closely spaced coils and seven pairs of magnets, we were able to get flux reversals in the cores every revolution of the wheel. Plus we were able to open up the air gaps to about 3/8" which reduced drag and still gave good output. Flux gate generators require a large air gap.

The hall triggered FET powering the three power windings, plus the dual recovery circuits, really helped the overall performance of the machine. I had a lot of fun building this with my grandson!