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.