Randall,  I think this is brilliant, and well worth dinking with, which I 
think I will do.   Thanks, Ted
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Randall Peters" 
To: 
Sent: Thursday, November 08, 2007 9:57 AM
Subject: idea for an axis


> Since the VolksMeter uses tungsten carbide to establish the axis 
> (extracted from
> ball-point pens), I should have thought of the following a long time ago.
>   A key to reducing rolling friction is to work with hard surfaces. 
> Another key
> to reducing friction in general (if possible) is to reduce the normal 
> force.  Both
> are achievable by hanging a pendulum from a rare earth magnet, using the 
> ferrous
> property of the tungsten carbide.
>    In a brief experiment this morning I stuck a 1/2 in cylindrical rare 
> earth
> magnet to the top of a steel door frame and then hung a ball point pen 
> from the
> magnet.  Discovered that the tungsten carbide tip of the pen could support 
> about
> 100 grams of weight.  Of course this arrangement is unsatisfactory for a
> seismometer because the physical pendulum that results (swinging pen) 
> moves as a
> spherical pendulum.
>    To get the required planar motion I took the refills of two pens and 
> glued
> them together.  The pair of pen points can support about 200 grams of an 
> inertial
> mass while constrained to motion in a plane.
>    The quality factor of this oscillator proved to be really high, with 
> the unit
> swinging in observable free decay for many hundreds of cycles.  It is 
> clear then,
> that the friction is very small indeed, by (i) taking advantage of the 
> hardness of
> both the magnet and the small tungsten carbide balls; and (ii) because the 
> field
> gradient of the magnet provides support for much of the mass of the 
> pendulum, so
> that the normal force is reduced as compared to most other configurations.
>     For you folks who have played with various axis types, what do you 
> think
> about this?
> Randall
> 

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