Hydroforming

[Bruno Ogorelec]

Didn't mean to ruffle feathers.

Well,I don't seem to have many to be ruffled anyway, ha-ha-ha...

A pulsejet would be good to ruffle feathers, by the way. It alternately blows in two directions. Ideal.

[Mark]

Didn't mean to ruffle feathers.

Well,I don't seem to have many to be ruffled anyway, ha-ha-ha...

A pulsejet would be good to ruffle feathers, by the way. It alternately blows in two directions. Ideal.

A long time ago, some internet guy had all these shapes for sale, a ton of valveless pulsejets you could choose from. It was if someone was doodling on a page and drew perhaps twenty schematics per page, and all of them were valveless, like some Tinker Toy plans you get with a jumbo box of Tinker Toys. I discarded the print out I made thinking this guy was delirious, almost any twist and shape was presented on several pages and he would build the shape of your choosing. It's good to keep in mind that a Mo-Fo lot of designs have be tried by greedy, diligent, or lovesick engineers long before many of us were even born, just as we wrestle to invent some new way of making fuel and air do our bidding.
How might your idea be new? That is the calculation you must make, are you and your idea unique or could any before you have scoured the gamut for some idea that might have yielded fruit?
If it is too "easy" to imagine, it may have already been tried. That goes for anyone who thinks they have arrived there first. Remember, many lovely shapes have been fondled.
Mark

[Mike Kirney]

Didn't mean to ruffle feathers.

A pulsejet would be good to ruffle feathers, by the way. It alternately blows in two directions. Ideal.

If it is too "easy" to imagine, it may have already been tried. That goes for anyone who thinks they have arrived there first. Remember, many lovely shapes have been fondled.
Mark

Feathers ruffled and blown? Lovely fondlings? This discussion is getting awfully sensual. I might have to put up some porn if this keeps going. I think most if not all individual technological ideas or paradigms have been discovered and attempted by now. Modern innovation comes from combining discrete and diverse ideas into new devices or finding new uses for old machines. Using new-fangled manufacturing methods to produce old-fashioned objects is also an area where innovation still has room to advance. Somebody once told me that in 1973, Rolling Stone magazine had determined that all possible harmonic and melodic combinations of musical notes in every key of the 12-tone scale had been tried, and that every 'new' compostition after that year was really just a collage of things that had come before. There are probably even fewer technological ideas out there than there are musical ones because technology generally has to perform a specific task to be of some value, whereas music just has to please one other person besides the composer to have 'validity'. Valveless pulsejets are very restrictive when it comes to refinement because they are really just a tube. Either your tube pulses or it doesn't. There are only so many shapes that will support such pulsating combustion, and those seem to have a given proportionality to them. In contrast, the ultimate example of petty innovation is the automobile, where every little piece of matter involved has a patent-holder for it, from the unitized body and frame, to the little clip that holds the spring that makes the cigarette lighter pop out when its hot enough to light your smoke.

[Hank]

OK, I have to do this, please forgive me...

Yozer- Joe sucks down that tepid Canteen Cup of Instant Maxwell House repleat with powdered milk, washing down that cold green can of Spagetti w/Meatballs. Soon he'll break out that four-pack of Luckys and settle down to a serious smoke. He'll save that little pack of paper for cleaning the bore of the trusty Garand. He can always wipe his ass with the Firt-Sargent's laundry.
Why is Joe smiling? He's short.

[Mike Everman]

Ha Ha Ha! that poster has been on my wall for years.

If it is too "easy" to imagine, it may have already been tried. That goes for anyone who thinks they have arrived there first. Remember, many lovely shapes have been fondled.
Mark

I rankle a bit on the whole notion that everything has been invented before. Just because someone visited it before, you still invented the approach. Things can be invented originally many times, and you still have the distinction of having brought it forth from the ether. And remember that most times, simplicity is the hardest won aspect of a good solution. One of my patents has everyone saying "well of course you'd do it that way" but no one did, or they dismissed it when they thought of it, or they weren't persistent inough to go through the mental and physical iterations it required.

True, some things like finding the Top Quark are out of reach to us, but you could be the one to invent that perfect combustor in your garage, no matter how many smart guys have attempted it, so everybody keep trying. No amount of grant money, education and fancy tools can beat the "luck" that comes from persistance, desire and inspiration.

[Bruno Ogorelec]

I think originality is vastly overvalued.

I hugely enjoy very old mechanical inventions because they often display the kind of ingenuity lacking today. They had to perform without help of a great number of crutches that we employ today. They had to be designed much more carefully and ingenuously.

Many of those old devices were invented before their time. It doesn't pay to be right before time. Just recently, I was reminded of that by the example of the old guy Fulton and his steamboat. When his invention was demonstrated to the admiring public, you might have watched it perform and thought, "Wow, this is future. The time of sail is over; I'll invest all my money in steamboats!"

Well, whoever did that, lost his shirt. The true age of commercial sail was only beginning and real fortunes were yet to be made with fast packet schooners, clippers, and enormous 4, 5 and 6-masted cargo barks. cargo sailboats were still being built and operated frofitably between the two World Wars. Steamboat was invented too early.

Fortunately, it was such an obviosu invention that it survived despite the premature ejaculation, but thousands of worthy but less obvious things fall by the wayside, forgotten, never attracting anyone's notice beyond the inventor's mother. Bringing them up again at a more propitious moment can work miracles.

Look at a very banal example -- roller skates and skateboards. They were originally invented and embraced by people a very long time ago. 1940s? I don't even know. But, they died a slow death because of inadequate technology. I know, I was roller skating in the late 1950s and it was very frustrating.

It was polyurethane wheels and cheap high-quality sealed bearings that brought them up again. They could finally be what they should have been from the start. As a result, they have become embedded in popular culture and their use does not seem to be abating at all.

With pulsejets, the secret was in the utter absence of their practical application. No one, but no one, needed small cheap jet engines in the 1940, 50s and 60s. Only young men with a passion for fire and noise really found them at all attractive or interesting. It is only now that hundreds of real-life applications have sprung up.

The result of this state of affairs is that there are thousands of pulsejet patents and ideas buried in the past, half- or fully forgotten, never really explored properly, never mind developed in practice. no one needed them Everyone but their inventors looked at them as a useless curiosity.

The worst aspect was that they were completely unpredictable. Industry hates, hates, hates unpredictability. Take a Dynajet and measure its thrust. If you make hundreds of measurements, the average will be remarkably consistent, but each individual reading will vary by 5 percent or more from the next one or the one before it. That is far too much for serious industry.

There was nothing in science that could make it more predictable because the math was simply beyond anyone's abilities at the time.

Today, we have great potential applications, we have the scientific means of understanding (and predicting) what goes on inside and we have means of making the thing perform well. So, who cares about originality? There's a vast untapped field out there ripe for development. If you wish to inject originality into it as a good seasoning, you are entirely welcome, but the filed will not have to depend on that. So much originality has been sunk into it without fruit over almost a century that the veins will be rich for mining for decades as it is.

[Mike Everman]

So, who cares about originality?

Bruno, there is very little chance of originality without a great deal of research into what's been done before. Sure, we now have tools and materials that can reduce the necessity of a great deal of experimentation, but if you are going make a goal out of a very low (so far never reported) specific fuel consumption or low noise or both; then clearly not enough approaches have been tried.
Having someone ask me: "how did you think of that?" is satisfying, but you know as well as anyone that any breakthrough, especially in a long established field isn't coming from a vacuum; it's coming from a distillation of all one can find that has come before, and hundreds of sketches that address the weak points of existing approaches, or explore silly juxtapotions of hardware.
Also, interdisciplinary research and making connections from disparate devices is paramount to discovery and creative solutions.
I couldn't agree more that the geniuses of yesteryear should be revered for thier ingenuity, studied profusely and evaluated for features that are ahead of their time or available materials.
This is not anti-gravity though, we will eventually hit on a quiet and no moving parts engine with a SFC of one! Now that's a goal!!!!