Rolling Ball Technology

An Online Technical Reference Devoted to Rolling Ball Sculptures, Clocks, and other Devices

By Members of the rolling-ball@lemur.com List

Contents

  1. Preface
  2. Acknowledgments
  1. Introduction
  2. Interviews with Artists, Engineers, and Others
    1. Sculptor Jeffrey Zachmann, Interviewed by Mark Olejarczyk
  3. Plans for Building
  4. Basic physics
    1. Uniform Acceleration
    2. Trajectories
  5. Straight track
    1. Geometry
    2. Acceleration
    3. Rolling Friction
  6. Horizontally Curved Track
    1. Banking (Railroad, Highway Practice)
    2. Entry/Exit Curves (Railroad practice)
  7. Vertically Curved Track
    1. Loops
    2. The Cycloid
    3. Keeping a Ball on Steep Track
      4. - Suspended Fork (Rhoads, Wallpiece XXXI)
  8. Track with Complex Curves
    1. Vertical Uniform Helix (e.g. Springs)
    2. Vertical Spiral Helix
    3. Horizontal or Sloping Helix (Uniform, Spiral)
    4. The Wok, Gravity Well, and Surfaces of Revolution
  9. Types of Track Construction
    1. Two-Rail
    2. Three or More Rails
    3. Channels
    4. Tubes
  10. Lifters
    1. Chain with Bucket or Claw
    2. Caged Screw (Gunderson, Matthew by Day)
    3. Archimedean Screw
    4. Pressurized Screw
    5. Tilting Channels; The Jantu
    6. The Scoop Wheel or Tympanum
    7. Unequal Buckets
  11. Ejectors, Releases, and Distributors
    1. Tilting Channels
    2. Magazine and Orifice
  12. Switches
    1. binary toggle
    2. binary pendulum (Rhoads, Wallpiece XXXI)
    3. Nth Ball Tilter (Mayenschein)
    4. Cascaded Switches (Knex)
  13. Elasticity
    1. Stopping the ball
    2. Reducing bounce
    3. Bouncers, Powered Bouncers
  14. Arms
    1. Simple Vertical Pivots
    2. Rhoads, The Imaginative Chip
  15. Calculating
    1. Probabilistic Distributions, the Quincunx
    2. binary logic
  16. Horological Issues
  17. Sound and Music Makers
    1. Idiophones
    2. WWW links to Musical Instrument Making, Experimental Musical Instruments
    3. Metal Web News Windchime Article
  18. Anthro- and Zoomorphic Figures
  19. Miscellaneous
    1. Trajectory Tracers
    2. Rolling Balls as Simulated Fluids
    3. Magnets
  20. Construction Techniques
    1. Making spiral helixes in wood (Sherriff)
    2. Using Copper Tube to Support Track
    3. Making Metal Rings Easily
  21. Sources
    1. Balls
    2. "Found" Objects
      1. gooseneck tubing
    3. Motors; horological motors
  22. WWW links to "meta" sites; Recommended books
    1. Metalworking
    2. Woodworking
    3. Plastics & Nontraditional Materials
  23. Bibliography
  24. Index

Legal Matters

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Version 2.5, 1999/03/20. Feedback to web@lemur.com
http://www.database.com/~lemur/rbt-contents.html

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