glinscott

Oh yes, this is the PhD version :).

The rivers and streams actually turned into a battleground! This is an excerpt from my beam engine article:

The fight for water Richard Arkwright's water-powered mill at Cromford opened in 1771, and the factory system that followed created fierce demand for the best river sites. Water-powered mills were also dependent on the weather: a dry season could shut down the factory.

Steam pumping engines offered a solution. An engine lifted the water that had passed beneath the wheel back up the hill, allowing the same water to fall through the wheel again. This kept the smooth turn of the water wheel, but wasted coal moving the water. Watt sold sixteen to twenty horsepower pumping engines to deliver ten horsepower to the machines.

Watt's double-acting engine, beam, crank and flywheel let the engine directly turn the line shaft. This met a huge demand from mill owners who wanted to build near workers and materials rather than around a particular stretch of river.11 One problem remained, though: every time a machine was turned on or off, the load on the engine changed.

Sorry it wasn't clear - the nut had 600 threads.

Oh wow, that's awesome! Thank you, I will correct the article.

I used onshape, but just the basics :). The thread cutting was done just as an animation.

Ah, heh. That's a very fair point. To be honest, I struggled with the title and subtitle, because most of my ideas had "Precision" in them, and it sounded like I was repeating myself.

I had thought about talking more deeply about the difference between them, but the article was already getting too long! It's certainly worth a footnote though. Revision upcoming :).

You are welcome! Thank you for the background, I'm glad it brought back some pleasant memories.

Yes, a wonderful book :).

Awesome, glad they helped :).

It's a mixture of techniques. Using fully rigged CAD models is a huge help, it ensure physically realistic motions. Then, I built a custom exporter / renderer to render them realistically in CAD style.

For a lot of the animations, I first develop storyboards to cover the main beats, and decide on what would be interactive or not. Then a lot of iteration with Fable (and Opus 5.5 now!) on how to show things clearly. A lot of time is spent trying to show the key ideas visually. Eg. in the bench micrometer adding an overlay with the size of the micrometer closing over the part, as well as showing the screw spinning was a big improvement in "readability".

Oh my, I forgot to add him into the credits for this one! The Beam Engine article has this: "Thanks to Bartosz Ciechanowski, whose exceptionally well written and designed articles inspired this one."

Yes, until they were able to get smooth rotation out of the engines, the water wheel was a much smoother source of power. Especially for looms and weaving machines, stable, smooth power was critical. "Power in the Industrial Revolution" by Richard L Hills is a deep exploration of the history there :).

Certainly a fair question!

The text was hand written, but reviewed by AI and light edits were made. The CAD models that drive a lot of the animations were either sourced or built based on pictures of historical machines. As called out in the credits, the interactive figures were built by myself and Claude Fable 5 (mostly - a bit of Opus 5.5 in there now).

The article itself was built over about 4 months.

Good question! From my reading, English engineering shops like these used 1/8ths and 1/16ths. Whitworth did push for "decimal inches" (1/10, 1/100, etc). It seems like the 1/12th and 1/144th were more common in watchmaking and optics.

Author here. This is a sequel to my beam engine article: https://glinscott.github.io/beam-engine/.

I started digging into Watt's challenges getting an accurate cylinder bore for his pistons, and it spiraled out from there :).

The article covers some of the key techniques developed during the industrial revolution to measure and make incredibly precise parts. There are a lot of animations and interactive figures to explore how it works.

Thanks, yes the capstan animation is one of my favorites :).

Great point on steel not being an option, I should have mentioned that.

RE: Hartford Steam Boiler Inspection - cool, thanks for the details!

RE: Things are more complicated - I totally agree. My favorite part of the article is probably the belt transmission section. I wasn't sure how it was possible for a leather belt to transmit so much power. Super fun to just dig in deeper and deeper to see how it works. Even there though, I left out a lot - the material properties of leather that let it work, how they attached the belts, the problems they had with gears transmitting power (partly leading to the development of the involute shape for gears), etc.

RE: safety valve, pressure gauge, etc. - yes, there is definitely another article to be built here :). Another fun aspect is safely starting the machine, warming it up appropriately, flushing water from the system, and the bigger engines even had a small engine to get the wheel turning.

Thanks!

And https://modelengineeringwebsite.com/Classic_ME_beam_engine.h... is almost exactly the CAD model behind this beam engine. Designing that on paper would have been quite a challenge.

You are welcome! I agree, it's a really nice way to learn about something. Digging into the transfer of power with belts may have been one of my favorite parts here, even though it's not really steam directly :).

Yes, great details! Not sure if you've read it, but "Richard L. Hills, Power from Steam: A History of the Stationary Steam Engine (1989)." is a truly wonderful overview, that really digs deep into the business. It has many letters directly from Watt, including the problems they had getting these huge engines built (before any decent roads!).

Thanks for the pointers! That is an area I've not explored much - reciprocating steam using modern technology. Using modern electronics, sensors and valves to optimize steam expansion would be a fun project. Perfect cutoff every time :).

Thank you, a lot of research went into it :).

And 100% inspired by Bartosz's articles - he is the first line in the credits section.

Fixed!

It was a mix of techniques, this article has been in progress for quite a while :). The first part was modeling all the relationships for an accurate beam engine in onshape (great cad tool). Then, I built a custom exporter to cleanly export it to three.js. This ensured physical realism for the hero of the article. All of these are linked from the article.

For the figures, I had prototyped some by hand, and it was slow going. Fable was the first LLM I found that was actually able to understand and model mechanical linkages correctly enough to be useful. I built a style guide, and iterated many times on each figure and animation until we arrived at something useful. There are also quite a few backing tests to ensure physical correctness of the animations (as far as reasonably possible :).

Thank you! I have a few ideas for the next article. Locomotives are up there on the list, but they are the final challenge of steam engineering, there is so much to cover.

Also considering the origins of precision - the intertwined evolution of machining tools and measuring systems that allowed these machines to be built.

RE: 3 year old - yes, mechanical systems are wonderful for children (and adults). There is something incredibly satisfying about watching them in motion doing work.

Oh my. Yes, you are totally right. This was tricky because I needed to merge two different animations (the governor moves independently from the rotation of the wheel), and I seem to have messed that up.

Fix shall be deployed shortly!

Blondihacks is amazing. Beware though, you may be buying a lathe and a milling machine soon after you start watching :).

It's a great hobby. Manual machining is totally different from writing code, but you get into a similar state of flow.

Definitely a fun note :). I think I heard it first from a Jay Leno youtube video where he was showing his amazing collection of steam powered machinery.

This is from the article, but governors also played a role in kicking off modern control theory! """ In 1868, James Clerk Maxwell studied when these oscillations grow or die away in his paper “On Governors”[https://www.damtp.cam.ac.uk/user/gold/pdfs/teaching/old_lite...]. This became one of the beginnings of modern control theory. """

Thanks!

RE: units - Good catch - there is almost certainly a better way to phrase this one. I always tried to give physical examples to make things more concrete. But who knows, maybe the bathtub will take off as a unit :).

Awesome! It's pretty amazing all the concepts that need to come together for even these very old engines. I found I built a better understanding of what was going on as I built out the animations as well.

100% - his articles were a major inspiration, and first line in the credits: - Thanks to Bartosz Ciechanowski, whose exceptionally well written and designed articles inspired this one.

Glad you enjoyed the units :).