Most Useless Machine Loses Carbon Footprint

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lxyQ3PFbK9Y]

[Clayton Boyer] took the electricity out of the useless machine, making one that runs like a clock. To this point, we’ve always seen these useless machine use electric motors. [Clayton’s] clever design uses a wind-up spring and a series of wooden gears to bring the fun, making it a great companion for the binary adder you built. The video above shows the inner workings and the design plans are for sale. We’d love to print out the parts or perhaps just laser-cut them from wood like the legs of this spider bot.

[Thanks llwynog]

23 thoughts on “Most Useless Machine Loses Carbon Footprint

  1. @stephen

    ““[Clayton’s] cleaver design”

    Not trying to be a grammar Nazi here, but didn’t you mean “clever”?”

    Not trying to be a post nazi here, but didn’t you mean spelling?

  2. Cool design, but I was honestly hoping “loses carbon footprint” meant that the act of hitting the lever powered the mechanism. This would make the lever stiffer (conservation of energy), but would make it much more “mysterious”.

  3. @DarwinSurvivor

    That would be a perpetual motion machine, which is impossible thanks to our friendly laws of thermodynamics.

    I agree that would be great, though. ;)

  4. @unaboomer

    No it wouldn’t. The second law of thermodynamics only applies to isolated systems. The human pushing the lever is imparting energy from outside the system, so the second law doesn’t apply.

  5. used to have a tin money box like this when I was a kid (long time ago). You wind it up, put the money on the switch and a skeleton hand would come and retrieve the coin.

  6. i need a cox baby bee 0.049 engine powered version
    or hell…
    maybe i’ll just go full size and use a lawnmower engine to power a TINY generator to power a motor for 1 of these :D

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