Thursday, October 20, 2016

What's a cool thing you ‘invented’ as a kid, only to find it had already been invented?

A continuously variable transmission. This was around age 13 or 14, in the mid-1960s. It featured two cones rolling against each other at a variable point of contact. I never actually built a working model — just vaporware! I found this image of something similar on the internet:

Addendum [this paragraph updated sept 2016]: I imagined the cones more convex and bullet-shaped compared to this graphic, so that the contact point between input and output cones, which determines the transmission ratio, is adjusted by slightly pivoting them around a vertical axis (oriented as in this graphic). I’ve subsequently seen a variation with an idler wheel interposed between cones, able to slide along a track parallel to the rotational axes.



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from Quora http://ift.tt/2ebqu09

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