For better or worse, a lot of human technology is confined to fewer dimensions than the three we can theoretically move about in. Cars and trains only travel two dimensionally with limited exceptions, maps and books generally don’t take advantage of a third dimension, and most computer displays and even the chips that make them work are largely two-dimensional in nature. Most styles of cooking can only apply heat in a single dimension as well, but [Dane Kouttron] wanted to make sure the meat his cookouts took advantage of a truly three-dimensional cooking style by adding a gyroscopic mechanism to the spit.
The first thing that needed to be built were a series of concentric rings for each of the three axes of rotation. Metal tubes were shaped with a pipe bender and then welded into their final forms, with an annealing step to flatten the loops. From there, the rings are attached to each other with a series of offset bearings. The outer tube is mounted above the fire and a single motor spins this tube. Since no piece of meat is perfectly symmetrical (and could be offset on the interior ring a bit even if it were) enough chaos is introduced to the system that the meat is free to rotate in any direction, change direction at any time, and overall get cooked in a more uniform way than a traditional single-dimensional rotating spit.
As a proof of concept [Dane] hosted a cookout and made “gyro” sandwiches (even though the machine may technically be more akin to a gimbal), complete with small Greek flag decorative garnishes. It seems to have been a tremendous success as well. There are a few other novel ways we’ve seen of cooking food over the years, including projects that cook with plasma and much more widely available methods that cook food efficiently using magnets, of a sort.
Will the meat passenger go into a wormhole once it gets up to speed? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z8axMaBL4uo (Contact 1997)
The lamb was ready to enter the VEGA system at any point in time!
There’s a silent lamb joke in there somewhere, but I can’t make it work.
Great metal work there, BTW.
Word on the street is he constructed a second one in a secret location just in case.
That leftover turkey is training up to be an astronaut. Mmmm dizzy meat
This approach to cooking may be a good use for a kind of tourbillon mechanism that is popular in outrageously priced watches.
[In the world of outrageously priced watches, some maintain that a tourbillon is an extremely elegant and ingenuous engineering solution for problem of trivial importance.]
Tourbillons exist because they look cool, yes. Anybody with a mechanical watch back then was synchronizing them with the train station clock every day or week anyway, regardless of the mechanics involved.. And people who still wear them today either sync them with their phone regularly or don’t care much about their accuracy because it’s really an accessory/bail fund if you get sent to prison, not your primary timepiece.
They might be more useful for self-winding watches, because you often forget to set them. A modern inexpensive mechanical watch will drift about a minute a week without regular adjustment.
They were invented because pocket watches would keep different time depending on the orientation they were carried or stored.
Supposedly.
I doubt they reduce error, in any case, ever.
They have no use on a wrist watch except impressing others.
Like a street car with a double clutch transmission.
Are kind of cool…but just status symbol.
Rich fools. Italian trash. Perfect match.
IIRC a watch with no complications, but more than (IIRC) 15 jewels has jewels doing nothing.
Jewel measuring contest!
I’ve seen watches marked as 99 jewel, no date.
Dog knows where they put them.
Also…Odd # of jewels?…’Must be 57 titties on that stage!’
I digress.
Tourbillions can be quite cheaply acquired these days.
I.e. under £1000.
While previously it would have cost at least 10,000.
But watch making was always about demonstration and showing off.
So it’s a gyros tourbillon
Hmmm, sceptical about the root cause analysis. Applying heat the a spheres of water, from all sides, would still not warm it evenly.
As I got older I do like my food a bit more rustic, uneven heat application, some char marks here and there, more Boby Flay.
Yeah I don’t get the desire to have perfectly homogeneous food. Strange, alien, OCD-type psychological trait. But I doubt that’s the true motivator here. Some guys just want to build things, and the application of the gadget is totally secondary. I suspect we all know a bit about that.
Also, the way the non-motorized joints are set up on this thing, it will always favor the center of mass pointing generally downward anyway. You can kind of see this in the gif on the website.
A one-axis rotating spit would actually work better. The additional axes simply to allow the device to swing freely, favoring the weight distribution of the thing being roasted.
And once the outer two rings experience gimbal lock, the meat will just hang there with the mechanism rotating uselessly around it.
And on the other extreme of the evenly-cooked-or-not scale, we have Thermite Thanksgiving
How about cooking with a laser cutter?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=au3l5F03JDc
(Spoiler: it tastes like burned hair)
biblically accurate grill
Man, this is just begging to become some As-Seen-On-TV product.
Want to show your cooking skills off to your friends and Family? Cook your meet in Three Deeee (Three Deeee)! Introducing the Emril Cook-O-Matic 360! Cook and lock in juicy meat juices with easy with the patented Cook-O-Matic 360 All Axis Technology! When your done it folds up in one lightweight package perfect for a picnic or beach getaway. Wow. But wait, there’s more! Call in the next 15minutes and we’ll throw in the precision stepper motor package Absolutely Freeeee. Call now!!!
Cooks in 1080 degrees!
(Because 360 x 3 axis, but mainly because higher numbers have to be better)
Maybe 360 ^ 3 instead?
And if you order in the next 20 minutes, we’ll throw in hair-in-a-spray-can!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spray-on_hair
I think you left Jodie Foster in there too long
Now THAT’S a good joke!!!
Love it!
I would argue that trains mostly move in one dimension. Mostly. Occasionally the switch tracks… But is that the train moving in a different dimension or the merely geometry of its universe warping?
the trick to truly even cooking of meat is grinding
biblically accurate gyro
The circular loops are nice visually, but there’s no reason they couldn’t be square, which would be much easier to build. You could clamp the meat between a pair of steel grids instead of using big forks. I think it would be easier to use different shapes and sizes of meat.
I’m not sure how easy this thing is to clean. You’re going to have meat juices dripping all over it. OTOH, the whole thing is going to get very hot, so maybe it doesn’t matter if you can’t get it super clean after every use.
Yes, but the juices will coat the machanism evenly allowing the heat source to steam and smoke the meat at every angle and with uniform flareup cookery adding to the magic of the the Emril Cook-O-Matic 360.
I am interested in seeing what it looks like when it eventually catches fire, fun for all ages outside of the flaming drip radius.
Won’t see many uses.
Not even the prototype.
Look at the size of the fire!
Fuel cost too high.
Fire management challenge.
Too much space between food and fire.
1 axis better.
Also:
Young goat.
The best Lamb you will ever have!
Hang ‘leg’ on string in front of fireplace, fruit tree hardwood.
Let spin.
Lime and mint mop.
Catch grease.
KISS.
Can get the same surround effect in a convection oven, or in a roundabout way if grilling is the task, a quality Mushikamado (original “Big Green Egg”) using Binchotan charcoal.
Now put it under a giant fresnel lens to make it a solar cooker! (Would want to somehow minimize the heat that lands on the rings though)The cool thing about a lens is that it can be pointed through a small opening in a highly insulated chamber.
Initial statement ‘trains only travel two dimensionally’ sounds wrong to me. Trains are 1D (one can describe any train position with a single scalar). One may object they are moving on the land surface; yes, but, they are also climbing hills, so they are 3D, not 2D, from this point of view. Cars can be really 2D, or 3D from the second understanding.
Trains travel across 3 dimensions but they only have 1 degree of freedom (fwd/rev) in their control system, the rest are dictated by the track.
Cars travel across 3 dimensions but they only have 2 degrees of freedom in their control systems the rest are dictated by the roads surface. (fwd/rev, yaw)
Planes travel across 3 dimensions and but their control system only has 3.5 degrees of freedom. ( fwd/no rev, pitch, yaw, roll)
Helicopters travel across 3 dimensions and have 3 degrees of freedom in their control systems. (fwd/rev, left/right, yaw). A helicopters minimal pitch and roll are biproducts of their directional movement.