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!
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.
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 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