Machine with Concrete - Arthur Ganson

[silentsniper441]

turn concrete block...first gear now a black hole

[sk83502]

i thought about waiting there until the last weel turns. but then i had to go to the toilet and got hungry...

[matt9741399]

Would have been nice if the first few stages weren't geared down so much.

[nodariel]

I've seen this in real life. Awesome piece of art.

[Mistraker]

He's going to have to replace a broken rod in about a trillion years. He'll be sorry then.

[lemmen1989]

is there a another gear inside the concrete, or what, ?

[scotterdoos]

Fake, at 0:05 you can see that the left half of the shaft is moving, while the right half does not. Only the first 2 sets of worm drives are turning. Everything else is disconnected from the motor.

[deepcangler]

@scotterdoos Are you blind?

[wendysimmens]

@scotterdoos it is moving, lookgin closely enough

[xeeweexRC]

the last gear must have enough power to drive a car!

[thefoxdude]

@xeeweexRC edit: drive a car with 0,000001 kilometer per hour ;)

[FHomeBrew]

This is awesome! Now turn the last wheel and see what happens to the first one :p I did this with my lego's a LOOOOONG time ago and it bent all of the rods and broke some bricks :-( I was not a gentle child. The machine said no, I said yes. Then it died...

[cyborgtroy]

@FHomeBrew - Nothing would happen, there would be loads of friction.

[TKaarel]

But will it blend?

[Sinjinator]

does he have some kinda concrete fetish?

[viperunderex]

Hm, how much torque does the last gear have?

Should be monstrous.

Great work

[visnevskiscom]

Most of best (IMHO) kinematic art I've seen on internet is made by Arthur Ganson.

I find these artworks very inspiring.

Hope to reach such freedom of mechanical expressiveness someday.

This one is my favorite piece.

[zgypa]

Artistically, masterpiece.

Scientifically, hm. Looks like the prediction might be off a little.

1. I don't understand how the last gear would get embedded in concrete.It seems it would rotate. I can't see anything that would translate in horizontal movement.

2. Not considering the effect of time on material degradation (concrete and wood), in a trillion years, do we really think the gear would start to get embedded in concrete, or the wood would crack, allowing the machine to bend and break?

[barracudabates]

How the hell is thi

s conceptual? You moron. It's realistic, and it needs no explaination.

[OregonDARRYL]

The reduction is 50 to the 12th power.... or one hell of a lot. There is another one very similar he made, but it is with regular spur gears. 25 of them. Each reducing speed 8.5 times. The first gear turns 80 times per minute. The last gear will turn once in 547 TRILLION years. He has it embedded in concrete too......... wow! That's less than one degree every trillion years.

[lolertep]

In the first sentence of the second paragraph, I think you mean "reduces the speed of the motor TO 1/50th" and, in the next sentence, you should have (1/50)^12.

[MWSJoey]

Imagine this in reverse!

[kingmike40]

This reminds me of the torque multiplier I bought from ebay. It has a gear ratio of 58 to 1 and I can use it to remove the lugs off of my truck wheels by hand. Usually I would have to call a service truck to bust the lugs with their air impact.

[littlestworkshop]

It will probably take a few millions of years to take up the backlash.

[robertwgardner]

Genius.

[BobFaulise]

i dont get it

[ratsglass29]

I agree WTF?...Even a calendar says Mon., Tues., WTF...However I don't stand there and wait for it to say WTF...in a 2 trillion years

[thefanofthewho]

I think the poster means (1/50) ^ 12 and not (1/50)12. That would just be (12/50).

[10DieterJamin]

Excelent Machine.

[postalgbv]

You need a warning sign on this machine! a bright yellow sticker warning people not to put their finger into the last gear.

[McLidl]

@postalgbv

Then it would take1 trillion years to chop their fingers off...

[Katoto400228]

@McLidl LOL!

[malakiblunt]

now this is conceptual art.

[MProper]

Great idea!

For me it visualise the dimension of human in the universe!

[theunknownsleeper]

just imagine the startup time

[parasietje]

It would be even more of a mindfuck to replace the concrete with a second engine, turning the other way. Paint one engine blue, one red, and paint colored arrows on the gears.

[cyborgtroy]

Nah, that wouldn't work, it's nigh impossible to drive a worm gear backwards, much less several of them.

[darkuran]

Well, even if normal gears are used, the 2nd engine wouldn't do anything (except maybe show its lack of power?), because of the immense torque on the gear from the 1st engine.

It would have been as if it's hit a gear, well, cast in concrete xD

[cyborgtroy]

Yeah. Because of the friction, you can't really drive a transmission backwards like that, it's more likely that the 1st machine would rip apart the 2nd machine, or itself, depending on how strong they were built. It wouldn't turn the output of the 2nd, though.

[gwinerreniwg]

To the artist: Love a lot of your work, but this is by far my favorite and most profound. Great piece!!

[zebrumera]

nice..

[nevada2000]

this is my favorite one of all.

[VolkgartenBySquirrel]

This is either an extremely clever tweak at engineering (an inverse rube goldberg machine) or some quark is rolling on the floor laughing it's muons off!

[seevaldisooda]

world's slowest machine

[yt2vinay]

More than turning anything in the concrete block, the flexibility of the gears and the material of the shaft throughout the assembly, once all slack has been used up, will absorb most of the energy.

[mrtrizzae]

I can imagine that even with incredibly precise machining it would take hundreds of thousands of years just to take up the slack in the final gear, let alone measure torque

[goadtoad]

what mebejoe11 said. But even with the best engineering possible it would be unlikely you could build a system where the motor was able to transfer any torque at all to the final gear.

Enough for you? Probably not. I don't care. I don't care whether you have an intuitive understanding of basic physics or not. I understand. A few people understand. I mostly restrict my interactions to that small subset of humanity and ignore the rest of you monkeys and your misconceptions.

[verdemanthe1]

i am so very glad that you think of the rest of us as monkeys

[RandyQuaid]

This is the most pointless thing I have ever seen.

[tinsel15]

accually it's pretty interesting if you know what the meaning of it is...i guess these people call it art GO Figure !

[redlegwarrior]

Apparently you don't know about the benefits of unreasonable amounts of torque.

[goadtoad]

to all the people who think the torque on the last wheel is (or would eventually be incredibly huge:

no.

[limeonaid]

why not?

[LokixOwnsU]

Just no? You're not going to bother to state why you think this? Are we supposed to blindly take your word?

[goadtoad]

the losses in the system scale less linearly than the torque.

[darkuran]

...only that the torque scales exponentially...

Think about it... Let's say that the engine has 1Nm of torque (E means engine torque, G# means torque at gear #):

E = 1 Nm

G0 = 1*E = 1 Nm

G1 = 50*E = 50 Nm

G2 = 50*G1 = 2500 Nm

G3 = 50*G2 = 125000 Nm

...

And yes, I realize that E/G aren't the standard symbols for torque in physics.

Besides, the friction would affect the engine at the start less and less, because the torque would increase

[goadtoad]

the losses in the system _scale more rapidly_ than the torque. How's that.

That the torque on the last wheel is not CURRENTLY huge should be obvious -- after all, it's the main point of the piece of art. That the torque could never even remotely approach the value you reach by mindlessly multiplying the gear ratios like a monkey taught to press buttons on a calculator ought also to be obvious

[Veteran4Peace]

The torque at the last gear must be some stupidly gigantic number. Wow.

[200609]

obviously a conspiracy

[burdtube1]

Wow, this is mind boggling!

[aeon6flux]

Give me a lever long enough and I shall move the world. - Archimedes

[beervolcano]

Archimedes should have also asked for an impossibly stiff lever. :-)

[DeltaWound]

By my calculamations, the force on the final gear is 244,140,625,000,000,000,000 times what it is on the first gear.

Even a small toy motor could theoretically push two planets apart, given enough time.

[knexfreak111]

and strong enough materials

[reanedful]

can u explain how this torque stuff works?

[technoanarkst]

Thanks m8. I was wondering what the mechanical advantage was. (and didnt wanna do the math)  <3

[rrrconserve]

What would happen if you ran the final gear in reverse, while simultaneously running the original motor?

[knowlton415]

If you ran the final gear on a separate motor, the gear ratios act inversely to how they are acting now, meaning each pair would increase the rotational speed as you went backwards counting the gears. I'm guessing that a gear would start slipping at some point, because its rotational inertia would not allow it to spin that fast. If it did reach the motor on the front end, I think it would sieze.

[HicuryyDicuryy]

Well actually you can't run a worm gear backwards, so nothing would happen, but if you had the same gear ratios using all spur gears the last gear would still be impossible to turn (ignoring slop) for the reason you mentioned

[yt2vinay]

Actually you can turn a worm-gear backwards, given the slippage factor, determined by lubrication and angle of the threads on the worm and spur, and locking condition are taken care of.

[paulfreefall]

what you have done is very beautiful indeed. it would be really interesting for everyone if there were some read-outs for each gear set. like a mile-ometer in a car for each set. it could be counting down a trillion years. have you seen the 5 billion year countdown clock at the arab institute, paris?

[milothereporter]

sweet. i dig.

[smncameron]

When you say "Each worm/worm gear pair reduces the speed of the motor by 1/50th." do you mean that a single pair would reduce the power of a drill turning at 50 m/s to 49 m/s, or to 1 m/s?

[przemekkarwowski]

it means that first gear totates at 50m/s, secon 1/50 of that (1m/s), third 1/50 of that second (1/50m/s), fourt 1/2500 and so on...

[randynov]

all that energy must be going somewhere, how much force will that final gear be able to exert?

[mebejoe11]

my guess is that the motor would be unable to overcome the amount of gear slop in this setup and eventually seize. It would need super-precise gear manufacturing and super-lubricated contact points to ever affect the final gear.

[HicuryyDicuryy]

It would take a very long time to eat up the slop and actually have contact between the last set of gears, but at that point in the drive train there would be so much torque that you could easily break either the concrete or the gears

[goadtoad]

you cannot build a machine that could affect the final gear, even if you had perfect nanotechnology and could build the theoretically most perfect and precise machine possible and ran it at the coldest temperature at which the materials would remain sufficiently elastic, having the best possible such materials that complete control of atoms using nanotech could give you.

How can this not be obvious?

[arcrftmek]

I dig your kinetic sculptures, but I don't get this one. What's happening?