It's part of a series for Chevrolet by Jam Handy. The Internet Archive has many more of them. A few: "Streamlines": https://archive.org/details/0142_Streamlines_M7960_09_08_44_... "Down the Gasoline Trail": https://archive.org/details/0542_Down_the_Gasoline_Trail_06_... "What Stops Them": https://archive.org/details/0797_What_Stops_Them_M6850_06_27... "No Ghosts": https://archive.org/details/0797_No_Ghosts_M7860_06_1…
How Differential Steering Works (1937) [video]
21–30 of 44 posts
Re: How Differential Steering Works (1937) [video]
#22Re: How Differential Steering Works (1937) [video]
#23The nice thing is, a planetary gearset can do basically the same, and is the building block of automatic gearboxes and Prius power distribution between ICE, electric motogenerator and wheels.
Did a project based around the Prius PSD in my Mechanical Dynamics and Vibrations class. Very cool, really opened my mind to the power of gears.
Re: How Differential Steering Works (1937) [video]
#24I wish, in school, teachers would have taught us things like this, how gears are just concurrent levers, how cams introduce asynchronicity to an operation. This is stuff I only started learning from working on and learning about cars. I remember even when I was in school (a good time ago now), they were already killing off shop classes and the like. How sad that schools couldn't see what values classes like that have…
Of course I found it especially cool because I was shop foreman both years - which meant I got to direct the cleanup at the end of class instead of having to do the cleanup!
The first semester was mechanical drawing, and the second was using the power tools and building whatever we'd designed in the first semester. Whoever scored highest in mechanical drawing would be shop foreman.
It was pretty awesome getting to use drill presses and bandsaws and lathes and all that good stuff as an 11-12 year old.
We did use eye protection, unlike my third grade "special ed for smart and restless kids" class where I told the teacher I wanted to etch a printed circuit board and I needed a tank of nitric acid to do it, and she got it for me! No eye protection back then, I just got to watch the copper dissolve away. (And fortunately, not my eyes.)
Anyway, I think I may have won the shop foreman job because I took great care in erasing cleanly. When you're doing mechanical drawing with pencil and paper and compass and protractor and a French curve and straightedge, a good eraser and that little metal erasing shield are your best friends:
https://www.google.com/search?q=erasing+shield&tbm=isch
That interest in whitespace seems to have carried over into my programming career. I'm a bit saddened by today's popular wisdom that says it really doesn't matter what the whitespace conventions in your code are, as long as you pick some standard and make everyone stick to it now and forever, and if you don't like something about the standard you're just bikeshedding.
I've had the good fortune to mostly work on teams that simply didn't have whitespace standards, so I got to see a variety of styles and learn from them all - which ones helped communicate the structure and meaning of the code, and which ones maybe less so. And also that it really isn't that hard to read code where one person's work has minor variations in spacing from another's.
If I'd been locked into rigid standards all along, I don't know if I would have had the chance to learn any of this.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not talking about sloppy indentation! You gotta get that right. ;-)
Re: How Differential Steering Works (1937) [video]
#25I wish, in school, teachers would have taught us things like this, how gears are just concurrent levers, how cams introduce asynchronicity to an operation. This is stuff I only started learning from working on and learning about cars. I remember even when I was in school (a good time ago now), they were already killing off shop classes and the like. How sad that schools couldn't see what values classes like that have…
Re: How Differential Steering Works (1937) [video]
#26You can buy a Lego differential gear to keep as a desk toy: https://www.amazon.com/LEGO-Technic-Differential-connectors-...
Re: How Differential Steering Works (1937) [video]
#27I wish, in school, teachers would have taught us things like this, how gears are just concurrent levers, how cams introduce asynchronicity to an operation. This is stuff I only started learning from working on and learning about cars. I remember even when I was in school (a good time ago now), they were already killing off shop classes and the like. How sad that schools couldn't see what values classes like that have…
I was in a Soviet school system (it was towards the end). And somehow we had a really fun shop class. We did stuff with electricity. Had a lathe, wood and metal. Remember making our own hammers. Learned to use a coping saw, a wood plane. School was remodeling so they let do demo work. Totally unsafe but loads of fun. Didn't learn about cars much though. We had so many things there that would be considered unsafe and…
Better brain dead than Red ;)
Re: How Differential Steering Works (1937) [video]
#28Re: How Differential Steering Works (1937) [video]
#29You can buy a Lego differential gear to keep as a desk toy: https://www.amazon.com/LEGO-Technic-Differential-connectors-...
Omg, great! I did it with lego technic back in early 90's (without those new fancy gears) when the simplicity and power of the differential struck me :) The simplicity of the differential is just beautiful !
Re: How Differential Steering Works (1937) [video]
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
Omg, great! I did it with lego technic back in early 90's (without those new fancy gears) when the simplicity and power of the differential struck me :) The simplicity of the differential is just beautiful !
FWIW, there was a differential in the lego technic 8865 Test Car from 1988: http://www.technicopedia.com/8865.html I think this was the first model with a differential. At least, that's what introduced me to it.
Fun fact: who is the largest manufacturer of tires in the world?
[1] https://www.facebook.com/notes/alok-menghrajani/afol-adult-f...