Optimum Speed.

I'd keep it under 3000 RPM.

Heck the faster it spins the faster they can shovel it in. At least 30k.

You know this device goes against your signature. Sound like some serious spaghetti eating.

Thanks Lyn, I was composing my addition when you posted the suggestion concerning "overspeed".

As for the "fan attachment" it is the prototype for this that was the cause for the little woman's deflated ego and subsequent demise.

GA, Lynlynch, So a new snype hunt has begun, did you try the tar on your bed liner?

A thousand pardons, I should have included this detail:

For the purpose of economy, I am trying to avoid any type of "spatter shield".

Aw shucks! I guess my suggestion of adapting a dental drill is no good then.

Say cordless spaghetti fork three times fast while in use. It's a real tongue twister.

The speed will depend entirely on the viscosity of the spaghetti sauce. Can't you make it variable speed? Will it be reversible? I've heard they rotate their spaghetti in the other direction in the southern hemisphere.

Sorry Dude, http://www.freepatentsonline.com/6442846.html.

No fame and fortune, but you can copy this and get to eating faster!

You don't say.....Bang!....right out of the water!

I'm hungry......

No, you've got to look at the claims. That's where the legal details are ... and the claims they've got are so loose you could drive a pizza van through them. It just says 'pasta' -- but try using that fork on ravioli or lasagna; it wouldn't work. They don't provide a legal definition of 'pasta'. You could define your fork specifically for use with spaghetti or linguini and side-step their patent easily.

_{/No I'm not a patent lawyer, I just play one on the internet.}

I liked this part:

after a user controlled number of revelations

That's a great side benefit!

I've had similar experiences, but I wasn't using a spaghetti fork.

A motorized dining fork is disclosed herein having an elongated hollow sleeve open at one end to insertably receive a shaft having a tined forked end. A battery-operated motor is mounted in the sleeve and forcibly rotates the shaft to twist the forked end. A gear reduction mechanism operably couples the motor drive shaft with the shaft of the forked end for controlled rotary movement effective to gather a pasta food product about the tines during an eating procedure. Bearing elements rotatably mount all turning shafts and control switches are employed to effect starting and stopping operations as well as RPM control.

From Freepatentsonline↑

But mine is counterrotating.......I like the term "insertably receive a shaft" which should be included on IRS documents.

Some patent attorney is being paid $300.00USD per hour to make up stuff like that.

Or this, from my patent:

(ii) a second horizontally disposed axle generally parallel to said first axle and carrying a plurality of circular rollers contacting and supporting said first planar surface of said substrate in a generally horizontal orientation as said substrate moves over said rollers on said second axle, said rollers on said second axle being interdigitized with said rollers on said first axle;

This is driving me crazy.....Is this the description of a mechanized roller derby rink without a machine guard, moving counter to the direction of travel for the skaters?

Each of these sections contains spray bars top and bottom. If you look at the right"input" section, you can see that the rollers are "inter digitized". Nothing will fall through, even credit cards, which is the size of the PCMCIA cards popular at the time.

Each section has a sump and pump that feeds the bars with chemistry.

This device is curved/waved to fit between the rollers and isolate the chemical processes with a convoluted curtain that is hollow and is fed with compressed air or N₂. This keeps the chemicals separated and reduces "drag out".

One on top, one on bottom with just enough separation to allow the circuit board through.

As far as I know I have the only part ever produced on the tooling we had made.

Thank you for the clarification, especially for the word "interdigitization".

The two" dia inter digitized rollers would fit into the concave areas on either side of the baffel. Although it's difficult to see the convoluted part is hollow and trimmed to direct the flow of curtain air back toward the 'upstream" chamber.

I feel that your going to have a harder time finding purchasers and if its cordless the battery will never be charged or will corrode from the dishwasher when they throw it in. Instead you could create a weighted fork and market the weight benefits for those who need to exercise, oh and they have to rotate it for added calorie losses. Woody

Ha! An alternative to pneumatics!

A weight-driven rotating mechanism - perhaps along the lines of the chiming or striking train on an old clock. A butterfly governor should do the biz - and plenty of weight there for "wrist exercise".

So what you need to do is make yours an "intelligent" spaghetti fork. At the opposite end to the fork, fit a viscometer and a small blunt blade about 1.27mm thick connected to a load sensor. Also put motion sensors in the handle. Use the viscometer to measure the sauce, and the blade to measure the firmness of the spaghetti (from 'soggy' to 'al dente'. The motion sensors will determine the type of eater: fast and furious or slow and sedate. Feed all this info to the central 'brain' which will determine the optimum speed. Use a stepper-motor instead of a dc gearmotor for better control, and ensure that it is programmed to sense when that last bit of spaghetti is about to emerge so it can give a little blip of speed at the end, ensuring an even spread of tomato sauce on the shirt front.

Keep this up and your going to get a cease and desist letter from the original motorized spaghetti fork guy's lawyer.

He's probably been waiting for years for someone like you to come along, a lawsuit could finally bring in some money. Poor guy probably can't even afford new batteries for his fork.

Here's your prize, providing you are into S&M....

Yummy! A little short on sauce though.

See what I mean, took me an hour to figure out what you meant by S&M, I'm surprised I didn't get it until the middle of next week.....Duh (spaghetti&meatballs)

I'm sitting here envisioning people with tight leather clothing, whips, chains.....and little red balls strapped in their mouths...Wondering, what the hell does S&M have to do with spaghetti.

I'd better shut up, I'm giving away all of my weaknesses. Next thing you know, I'll be riddled by riddles.

"... about 1.27mm thick ..." - care to put a tolerance on that?

Yes, +/- 20micron. With spaghetti, a good eating experience requires a certain precision. When you're expecting al dente you don't want stodge.

There are several posts that are marked off topic. I believe everything so far is on topic with the original intent and I am highly offended!

I'm reporting this to the administrators.

I googled "Rotating Fork", and came up with this. Talk about moving some spaghetti!

Full 360 degree rotation!

I've heard of canned ham and canned spam, but a 50 gallon drum of spaghetti is truly overdoing it!

That's just S&M Lite^®--lashes with wet noodles....

In order to contribute something of value to this discussion, I decided to conduct an experiment. Since my electric toothbrush does not actually rotate, and the chuck requires a really weird interface, I decided to use my variable-speed Dremel as a test tool. I had to fabricate the fork- first, turn down some 1/2 inch stock to give me a 1/8 inch shank to chuck into the Dremel. Then I drilled a 1/8 inch hole at right angles in the stock to add additional tines. I turned down some more 1/2 inch round stock to give me a piece of 1/8 inch bar to use for the outer two tines (I wanted a four-time fork, but I did not have time to work out an appropriate design for such). A little bit of playing around with tolerances and I was able to get a force fit of the piece forming the outer tines (had to heat the center tine while assembling- then had to disassemble the whole thing and start over, because the half inch center tine was WAY out of proportion to the outer two tines. Turned the center tiine down to about 3/16 inch- did not do a really tight control on dimensions for this operation). Finally, I had something that closely resembled a three tine fork.

Next, I realized that my Dremel had no provisions for adding a tachometer. So, I moutned a small microphone to the Dremel and fead the output to my oscilloscope, whereby I could get a reasonable measure of the rotational speed (unfortunately, the Dremel has warn bearings, so, especially at low speeds, it is rather difficult to extract exact speeds from the signal, but we can get approximate speeds with appropriate post-processing of the signal).

The hardest part of the whole project was convincing the wife to cook me up a plate of spaghetti for the ultimate test. I omitted meatballs because I could not figure out how to pick up meatballs with a rotating fork. So, the wife cooked up a nice plate of spaghetti with a white clam sauce...

At very slow speeds, the device picked up absolutely no spaghetti at all. As I increased to speed (perhaps a bit too rapidly), I lost control, the outer tines bent all to hell, and the plate broke.

I guess I need to give a little more thought to this...

You've been watching too many episodes of Scrubs & Dr Jan Itor.

Due to information provided by distinguished members of CR4, concerning patents already in place, I have decided to enter the "niche" angle by development of a pneumatically powered variant, aimed at hungry auto mechanics.

Pneumatic normally implies high speed / low torque: not ideal for spaghetti rotation.

How do you really expect to maintain control!!!

Do auto mechanics eat pasta? And whether so, or not, do we really care?

Furthermore, should we question four candles vs, handles for forks?

How about a pneumatic motor using three 120° opposed proportionally controlled cylinders connected to a crankshaft?

With suitable prop. control valves & feedback, and a 3-axis controller, it should be possible to maintain perfect control. The control system would all probably fit in a small suitcase - wheels would be an advantage for mobility (allowing for the weight of the air reservoir and compressor). The effector could be coupled to the control unit with a pneumatic and electric umbilical of about 12.7mm diameter.

My dear John. Now we are getting entirely silly!

Why should wheelchair users have one up on the rest of us, so they can plug their spaghetti forks directly into the armrest, whilst the rest of us have to have something akin to a Hoover trailing behind us!

Furthermore, let our metric be metric, not a feeble excuse for metric/imperial. The umbilical should be 10mm!!!

1. I sincerely hope you're not suggesting that we should discriminate against wheelchair users.

2. For the umbilical, my calculations show the need for 6 airlines of 7.07mm internal CSA each and 0.5mm wall thickness, and 6 sensor cables of 3.3mm OD. This totals to 126.7161mm². If this could be constrained into a circular bore umbilical, the diameter (by calculation) would be approximately 12.702mm. I rounded this in my previous post.

It may turn out that this is very close to an imperial measurement of ½". I would do the sums, but I CBA.

At the risk of any ethical transgression, I had in mind Fiat mechanics. Although on second thought I would be concerned about a Fat Fiat mechanic, if I owned a Fiat.

As far as speed control there is always the centrifugal governor (not the Governer on the tilt-a-whirl).

Suck, compact, disperse, enter body. Why the rotation bit?

Gosh, I can't believe I am even replying to this. Looks like I'm gonna have some for dinner and tell the missus about this. Maybe not.

How about a patent attorney put his head around this? Does this suck or what?

Hope all goes well, Ky.

ky,

what the pic?

Tests to show that things can be picked up with out suction but by mechanical means. Seventh prototype. Now, years later I have it down to a fine art. All very hush hush and an application in sight. You'll know one day Lynn, just you wait and see, Ky.

I have just learned that the inventor of the original rotary pasta fork is being sued for $500.000.000USD! It so happens that a person (a professional lip model) was severely injured when his mustache became entangled in the fork-tines of the device.

If this amount is awarded the inventor will be left with only a small end table, a chair and a telephone, oh and this Thermos.

In all this time, no one has suggested an optimum speed. I have now done enough fork-twirling to recommend a range between 30 and 120 rpm--but only if you are a fork twirler. If you use a fork alone, go in the slower range. If you backstop with a tablespoon, you can go to the fast range. If you cut your spaghetti/busghetti with a knife and fork, you can forget all about the dervish stuff.

See the spaghetti-eating scene from "Tampopo"; indeed, see the whole movie. *****

"I have determined that any speed over 62.5 RPM will induce rapid separation of sauce from..........................."

... and just think what a Godsend this would have been for those with spaghetti tunnel syndrome.

Ok, so its wind-up spring powered mechanism, crank it up before dinner and it should last through a single plate.

So far this has focused entirely on the rotational speed. It is high time to spin off a subdiscussion on how far apart the fork tines should be. For starters let's say 13mm ≈ 0.5". Confirming and contrary opinions equally welcome/detested....

Not to mention thixotropic qualities of the sauce.

Boy, "spin off a subdiscussion" begs for spell check.

Tine spacing is not critical at my house. As long as it gets to the lips, that's good enough.

13 mm sounds like one HUGE fork. How many tines? Three or four? My "standard" four-time fork (admittedly not optimized for spaghetti eating- this is a general-purpose device, meaning it is most likely a design compromise) has a tine separation of approximately 6.0, giving an overall width to the fork of 18.0 mm on the centerline of tines (19.0 mm to outer edges of tines at the tip). The tines themselves taper to about 1.5 mm width at the point, and are roughly 40 mm long, from where they separate from the fork body. The fork is made from material that is approximately 1.0 mm thick. I suspect the taper of the tines is also going to be an issue that must be addressed- too much taper, and your libel to lose your noodles...

Unfortunately, I have no cooked spaghetti at hand for measurement (I vacuum-packed the remains of my last experiment, including my failed rotary fork, and buried the package in the back yard to give future archaeologists something to argue about in 5000 years or so), but I do know that different varieties come in different cross sections, and that the diameter can vary depending on cooking parameters. Can someone else offer some insight into the dimensional variability of spaghetti? I suspect we need to evaluate traditional versus New Age, variation between manufacturers, effect of varying the cooking time (and possibly other critical cooking parameters), and, of course, the differences between the various varieties...

Also, can someone please help me explain to the wife why I am sitting here measuring her cutlery in stead of doing something productive...

Why not take advantage of a certain fixed direction of rotation and "cant" the tine tips in that direction? This would ensure engagement upon introduction........

Sort of a "garden vermicelli weasel"?

Who started this nonsense????

Blimey! Imagine what one of these could do to yer plate of spag bol - never mind yer face!!!

You wouldn't want one of those as a bicycle saddle either. It could improve times for a while though

By Jove - I think you have it!

"Cant" the tines - two in one direction and two in the other - there by it "drills in" in one direction and "self un-lodes" in the other - brilliant!

Now the question of al dente HP, verses stodge HP, is obviously solved by a "rattle gun" option - but I suppose if one wanted battery, not pneumatic, then "hammer drill".

This just leaves how to be sure that when inserted in the mouth, it always 'unloads' - rather than 'drills in'.

I saw a solution for an actuator recently that might answer this - drill a small hole and put a magnet in it and use a reed relay and a 555 timer.

Seems perfect, as the magnet would sense if the fork is vertical to the earths field or horizontal - Done!

There is no truth in the rumour that KrisDel^TM want world-wide marketing rights, then?

I havn't been able to come up with a concrete answer but you owe me a T-shirt.

Oh, don't start on about concrete. Next thing ya know, they'll all be at each other's throats arguing about whether it's "poured" or "placed".

Splarf

That one? Never to be forgotten, like mentioning the war.

Gosh it was funny!

Don't Mention the War

I like the "fraction thereof" part of the OP. So let's get down to brass tacks and spell this out precisely: 61-8/13 rpm, not a bit more nor a bit less.

I don't think brass tacks will hold much spaghetti...

2 x Φ1/16" x 9" = 1 minibite, but you need to backstop it with a spoon.

Could one incorporate a hinged, spring-loaded, thumb-operated (or automatic) spoon onto the device? This would leave the left hand free (or right hand for the sinister ones) for grasping wineglasses or swatting flies.