When I was younger and idealistic and not skilled enough, I tried making good solar cookers on equatorial mount. I think some of my ideas were good but I couldn't put them into practice and collaboration was pretty limited. Other people pretty much refused to work on "my" ideas, I think that using buckets and floats is a good way of moving and stabilizing big reflectors, especially if it's windy. Gusts can do damage to gears, Etc but not much they do to a float. . I think the way forward is pendulum timing of the moving of solar cookers. https://solarcooking.fandom.com/wiki/Solar_tracking contains some of my stuff and https://solarcooking.fandom.com/wiki/Ideas_for_low-tech_solar_tracking has some more. The problem was a "water clock" is not accurate enough or repeatable enough to run the timing of turning a solar reflector. I made one with a float with a hole in it and it's pretty good, just not the required accuracy when the buckets aren't perfect cylinders, (they are cone sections). But an escapement, pendulum and weight would be accurate enough. There is not need for any of the extra gears that run a clock. The weight attached to the escapement mechanism, powers the pendulum and as it drops, the float (attached to it) drops too. So it's a pretty minimal timing system. As long as we can get the weight to drop at an inch per hour or say 2 cm per hour, we can work things out so that the equatorial mount will turn evenly throughout the daylight hours. But, I looked up on Amazon and ali baba and there are no pendulum's and escapement wheels for sale. Can I DIY or is there some other solution? I did try using a battery operated clock to lower a float years ago, but they have extremely weak motors, not able to lift a small float in the water. I thought stepper motors (with say, 15 minute steps) but I haven't a clue what to buy or how to set it up. So, anyway, the thing would be very simple, just the escapement, the pendulum and the weight, (because we don't need all the gears that run clock hands. By the way, someone recently commented on one of my videos and said that one of "my" ideas was thought of almost a hundred years ago by a Portuguese priest. The video of his work (In French but you can translate with google) is pretty amazing. Here is the link
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jorwI9dg1g4
Suggestions appreciated, Link showing how escapements work is below. Thanks, Brian White
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escapement
Maybe Restarting My Solar Experiments, Fixing Past Failings
Re: Maybe Restarting My Solar Experiments, Fixing Past Failings
