Category Archives: Toys for boys

Fan car – Ring record threat

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There’s a good reason why fan cars have been banned in motorsport. Cars sucked to the ground will always produce astonishing cornering accelerating and braking performance but any disruption to the skirt contact with the ground – such as running over a kerb – is likely to see a very rapid accident under way. Of course, a car that literally scrapes along the ground can only be used on very smooth race tracks and would be impractical for the road. The engineers at Original Twist don’t entirely agree and think a new approach is called for. Here is the Original Twist fan car design. The usual idea is that flexible skirts on the car scrape along the ground to maintain a seal, the air pressure inside the skirt is reduced with a fan and the pressure differential forces the car down. The Original Twist idea deviates by separating the skirt from the car; an independent suction pad is held under the car and with its lightness and agility this pad is free to track the road contours even if the car is in more vigorous motion.

The suction pad is circular in order to keep the air bleeding edges to a minimum. A 60” diameter area with a 1 psi pressure drop will produce 2,800lbs of downforce; about the weight of a car then.

The suction pad is not directly attached to the car. Instead it rides on 4 small wheels like a circular go-kart which is towed under the car.

Fan car suction ring

Fan car suction ring

The skirt edge is held very slightly off the ground so there is no horrible scraping noise as you move along. The skirt is different too and employs hovercraft principles in reverse. Apart from the main extraction fan air is blown out of slots round the edge against the air that is trying to get in and that makes an inertial barrier. The blowing can be done with an extra fan in the nose of the car for example. The extractor fan probably won’t double up as the blower because the pressure/flow characteristics are different but it would be worth investigating. A concertina bellows connects the skirt edge to the underside of the car floor and the seal is complete. The skirt/kart is pressed lightly to the ground by the trailing links that locate it and although the relatively heavy car might be jumping and jiggling the skirt will tend to remain flat on the ground and unlikely to reveal a sudden and potentially deadly pressure change.

With an electrically driven fan the downforce on the car can be tightly regulated and as aero downforce comes with speed the fan speed can be decreased accordingly until eventually there is no need for it and the whole underkart can even be retracted. The retraction feature makes the fan car suitable for the road; a fan car that can cope with humps and farm tracks and then pop round the Nürburgring in 5 minutes has got to rewrite the book somewhat.

While all this is alluringly simple there is one complication. Cornering with 8 wheels instead of four is going to be out of this world but the kart wheels will need to be steered unless they are on castors. A supermarket trolley under the car won’t add much dynamically but a steered go kart, pushed down very slightly by the trailing arms, will make a major contribution to the cornering forces.

The potential for electric sports cars has been examined in

https://originaltwist.com/2015/11/04/electric-sports-car-2020/

but the main point is that all the performance extremes of current supercars, in terms of acceleration, cornering and braking , can be exceeded by a factor of two or more. That means forces on your body, and head, of over 2g. It’s like doing press ups with someone sitting on your back so you’d need to be immensely strong to try the brakes without a full harness seat belt on. Cornering and braking at the same time would see you clawing your way out of the passenger footwell.

Formula One drivers experience forces like this but now a moderately priced sports car will be able to deliver the same. Headline figures of 0-60 in 1.5 seconds and 120mph in around 3 or 4 seconds will reset the performance bar in a shocking way. A 5 minute ring time is technically possible – just a question of who and when?

Note: Suck is a concept for when the force of atmospheric pressure – or other – acts against an object with lowered pressure on the opposite side. Really there is no such thing as a sucking force; when you ‘suck’ on a straw it is atmospheric pressure pushing your drink into your mouth.

With any fan car it is the weight of the atmosphere above the car which is pushing it down.

Atmospheric pressure is 14.7 psi at sea level so this sets the theoretical upper limits of our skirt with a total vacuum on one side. That would be about 18 tons in this case so the 1 psi pressure drop that equals the weight of the car is not too much to aim for and might easily be exceeded.

Modern canal boat

Posted on by • Posted in Eco-house, Heating, Toys for boys, vehicles • Tagged , , , , • Leave a comment
click to enlarge

click to enlarge

Introducing the Original Twist canal going house boat; in the style of a narrow boat only bigger, better and absolutely modern. As a living unit it presents an economical lifestyle choice. For around £160,000 you get very low cost housing and maybe some change left over for a holiday house, long ski breaks and other good things. A comparable land based house or flat would be twice the price because of the cost of land, a boat on the other hand effectively rents the river via the canal licence and avoids council tax. This one avoids energy bills too which is a good start.

A house boat might be small but as well as reduced outgoings there are some great advantages. You are never stuck anywhere you don’t like; if you need a change you can just cruise to somewhere else, maybe near a cosy riverside pub. River life can be like an aquatic pub crawl but without the driving. You’ll make more friends among the friendly and hospitable canal community too, especially with the most interesting boat on the water.
There is more scope for travel than just the English waters as you can get a tow across the channel to use the huge French network extending all the way down to the South of France where winters are not so harsh. Otherwise the house boat is an attractive proposition for a house swap so the whole world is your lobster.
It’s a tough life being retired!

The Original Twist Eco-house boat is all about, modernity, comfort and enough economy to make a modest pension go far. Many traditional boat ideas have been updated to achieve this.

Construction
Unlike a go-anywhere narrow boat ours is 10 feet wide and 55 feet long – we’ll forgo visits to a few stretches of narrow canal in exchange for a lot more room and the garage – yes that’s right, a garage.
The shell of the boat is normal steel but without the enclosing steel roof parts. The front saloon and the rear transom are full height steel as is the central bulkhead that separates them. The two open parts between the steel constructions are connected at roof level by tubular trellised ladder frames which run the length of the boat interrupted only by the central bulkhead. The open parts of the boat are then covered by 2 insulated wooden rooms made of plywood and foam panels (SIPS).which are factory prefabricated – complete with windows, pipes, wires etc. This makes the boat lighter, cheaper and better insulated.

The two central living spaces house the kitchen a bedroom and shower room, all with heated floors. Each has a large pop-up roof (just like on a camper van) to give a more spacious feel while being flattened whenever a low bridge is encountered. These roofs carry the solar panels and can tilt sideways in either direction to catch the sun – the simple mechanism to switch hinge points is activated by the flick of a switch – an air cylinder shoves a cradle from side to side.
The steel and glass front saloon is very light and airy with a door giving access to the front deck. Standard fan-coil units are turned on end to make a pair of powerful demisters for the huge windscreen and to heat the room too.
A flat sun deck on the roof of the saloon makes a great place to watch the world go by and as we shall see later the boat can be steered from up there too.
The steel rear transom accommodates the propeller shaft, engine mounts, rudder mechanism, a niche for the air source heat pump.  A tail hoist mounted across the back (like on delivery trucks) supports a light vehicle such as a Polaris RAZR side by side.  After adjusting the height the ramps are dropped and locked onto a nearby bank so one can drive off in style and comfort. What is life without wheels?  Because the hoist can be folded up, the length of the whole boat can be shortened to navigate some of the tighter locks. An awning can be extended over the vehicle and there we have it; the first house boat with a garage.

Eco-tech
The real point about eco-technomologicalness is to get along as cheaply as possible without damaging the planet. The 20 solar panels on the top produce a nominal 8kWp; a lot more than most domestic arrays and enough for the small air source heat pump and to charge the batteries for the electric hybrid drive system. The hybrid drive is almost identical to that on the Original Twist hybrid 3-wheeler found on this site; here with a Lynch motor and a Kohler water cooled diesel. The usual benefits of a hybrid drive are there; the batteries give a few hours silent cruising and the diesel can take over indefinitely. The batteries are mostly solar charged or sometimes diesel engine charged with the Lynch motor doubling as a generator. Many moorings supply electricity so the batteries can be charged on cloudy days. With the air source heat pump the heating will run cheaply and conveniently off connected electricity or the batteries.  So there are 3 sources of heating power; the PV panels, outside electricity and engine cooling . Most boat engines are cooled by river water but here a second coil in the heat bank uses the 60% of wasted heat to make hot water. There is no connection to the river or the gunk that blocks up the filters (boat owners nod knowingly here).
Heating is supplied by the little 2kW heat pump which delivers about 6kW. N.B. River water is not used as the heat source. See ‘Air source heat pumps in Southern Europe’ also on this web site. here
Notable omissions are a wood stove and any gas as there is no need for either. Cooking is all electric.

Controls
Control of all the lights, heating, entertainment and even the steering is done by i-pad and Z-Wave meshed radio modules which are cheap, reliable home automation items. Narrow boats are usually driven from the back, a bit like a bus driver standing on the rear bumper. We can sit at the front in the saloon and steer from there or from anywhere else within range of the wi-fi; perhaps the sun deck even from the nearby pub! The Z-Wave controller allows for plenty of home automation tweaks like lighting control, security and leak detection, all from anywhere in the world. Theoretically the boat can be driven from anywhere there is an internet connection.
Actuators to move things like the roof panels and the rudder are operated by compressed air which is cleaner and easier to maintain than hydraulics. An i-pad and Z-Wave relays makes child’s play of these things; even a simple dimmer switch allows proportional control of the rudder.  The motorised satellite dish also needs to fold into a recess in the centre section when a bridge is encountered.

Neat extras
To make the kitchen a great place for eating while admiring the view the picture window on one side tilts up and out and a table is pushed outwards to make use of the outside space. Once parked up an extending awning over a drop down side deck, complete with an extending Barbie unit, makes an outside cooking area.

Central dust extraction – The centre section houses a fixed dust extractor plumbed to outlets around the boat to make cleaning much easier.

With a boat like this life will certainly be rich and varied.

ECO-HIPPY – One who is sufficiently off-grid to live almost cost free.

More on this topic in LIST OF POSTS

Silent PC

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Top view

Top view of the case

Fanless PC case by Original Twist

A totally silent Mini ITX PC case made from low-cost, off the shelf components with an easy progression from prototype to large scale production.

Things are moving on in the world of desktop computers; they should be cheaper and simpler, but, would you believe it, they’re not. Why?

Main CPUs run much cooler and use less power so, unless you need a powerful gaming rig, you don’t need big fan cooled power supplies or case fans. Heat pipes can remove all the heat most CPUs make.

Solid state discs (SSDs) are cheap and clip neatly into the motherboard M.2 slot. Hard drives are not required at all when data is stored in the cloud.

Delete the SSD and HDD parts on the drawing and what is left? Just a mini -ITX motherboard and (maybe) an open power supply; two components then.  No moving parts, no noise and much less cost.

The Original Twist fanless PC case

The extruded fin case side is glued onto extruded aluminium corner sections; both are available from stock.  The corner sections have slots to accept side panels in any material – the blue parts on this drawing could be marble, for example, or wood.

The huge finned extrusion makes one side of the case.  By huge, I mean really huge. 40mm deep and 160mm wide with a 10mm thick base all ready for embedding 6mm heat pipes. Heat transfer is via 6 heat pipes.

There are multiple disc drive mounting options opposite the motherboard and also higher up the case if required.

The open case power supply (PSU) is mounted low down in the side channel extrusion.  Any heat produced from this and the motherboard drives the updraft.  The case is deliberately like a chimney and needs a bit of heat to get going.

Cooling

Side view

Side view

The Magic Power (PSU) in the drawing is only 80W so we’ll probably drop that. A better solution will be a Pico-PSU i.e. an external (sometimes internal) brick with internal ATX distribution leads. The case can easily cool the 65W of the popular Core i5 8400 which will make a very high performance machine at a reasonable price. The 6 heat pipes only use the top half of the case.

When standing up the tall chimney case draws air up through the bottom and expels it at the top so cooling is effected both inside and outside the case. The aluminium corner extrusions are part of the heat sink and are bonded on with heat transfer glue.

The finned  clamp for the heat pipes on the CPU sits neatly in the airflow as do the heat pipes on their path to the side wall. The mother board, mounted at the bottom of the case, heats the air at the lowest point. Full height cock’s-comb RAM coolers also heat the air low down and the same for clip on fins on the SSD.

Case size 124.5 x 240 x 375mm

The components dictate the shape.

Width – the I/O shield between 2 corners

44.5+40+40 = 124.5mm.

Side length – the finned extrusion between 2 corners

160+40+40= 240mm

Height/length – 170mm motherboard with space for HDD above and masses of heat sink

375mm.

Design notes

The corner extrusions come with threaded inserts for the ends and these are used to bolt on the top and bottom plates.

4 big round feet enable the start button to be fitted in the base plate as well as the ‘power on’ LED and an angled power plug.

The radiused corners on the end plates match the case style.

Market position

There are many contenders for this silent PC slot but they are generally expensive and don’t have as big a heat sink. They are computers with heat sinks – ours is more a heat sink with a computer attached.

The beautiful, contrasting black and aluminium finish looks truly modern making this ‘the computer you want’ and in every way better than ‘the computer you need’.  Design flexibility allows the non cooling sides to be in various materials such as wood, aluminium or marble, none of which requires special tooling to produce.

Flexibility

This case provides excellent flexibility for product variation and expansion. The side panel with the I/O plate is long enough to mount DVD players or removable drive bays.

Marketing

Our philosophy is simple. Cut waste and spend the difference on better components.

Designed in solid aluminium this PC brings you beautiful modern looks that reflect the quality and performance of the internals.

To bring you the best value for money with absolute reliability we removed all the moving parts. All discs and fans have been replaced by top quality components to bring you the best value, high performance, totally silent PC.

The solid state drive gives exceptionally fast boot times and application loading.

Super fast USB-3 ports are available for you to plug in your external media storage devices or there is room inside for a hard drive.

The side plate holding the PSU can also house an optical media drive bay (41x146x185mm- dotted line on the drawing). A blue ray player built in makes the perfect HTPC.

The Technical stuff  below … read on if that’s your thing

Assembly

heat pipe layoutThe computer is assembled with the finned side down. The heat pipes are cranked down once clear of the motherboard and are pressed into the machined slots in the side. After that the PSU channel and the opposite face plate are fitted along with the I/O plate.

Any SSDs or HDD are screwed onto the lid with their looms running neatly up the side so as not to impede airflow. This lid and attached corners then bolts on and finally the end plates hold it all together.

The bending of the heat pipes is fairly minimal but it is, none the less, quite critical. The sketch above shows how just 3 shapes of bend are needed to fit all six pipes. The yellow positions show where additional heat pipes could be laid to increase the effective heat sink. The pitch of the heat pipe slots on the heat sink have to be exact multiples of the pitch on the CPU block.

Thermal performance calculations

The 6 heat pipes on the CPU block can remove at least 15W each and almost double that with the case in the upright position. Additional air flow through the case in this position will also remove some 10W from the CPU heat sink. So the pipes can remove well over 100W but, of course, we need to dispose of this heat through the case.

The heat pipes only lie in half of the finned side and the manufacturer’s figures suggest a DegC/W of 0.45 for this length. With the CPU at 50C and a room at 22C we would be looking at 65W cooling power which is in line with the 65W Core i5 8400. Actually CPUs can run much hotter and the cooling power would be equally higher.

The heavy aluminium heat sink side has plenty of room for five additional heat pipes to be placed between the existing ones and with heat pipes embedded along its entire length the case would be able to remove around at least 80W.  It is hoped that the case will be able to lie flat for 55W chips and be good for practically anything while standing up or on a VESA mount. The added cooling power of the corner extrusions has not been taken into account in these calculations so real world performance should be much better than indicated.

Theory is all very well but we can be sure by comparing with several existing silent PCs which work perfectly well. The Original Twist design has cooling surfaces of around 5 times that of the others so this should be the best of its kind. Some PCs have heat sinks; this PC is a heat sink!

This case is not in production yet. If you would like to own this design and the business of producing it please get in touch using the Original Twist contact form.

Magic disappearing table

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Now you see me

Now you see me

Now you don't

Now you don’t

You’ve been one of eight guests for dinner in a very modern eco-house. You all dined on a lovely heavy wooden table standing on four polished steel pillars; all very much in keeping with the modern house. You help to clear away the last plate into the kitchen and when you return 10 seconds later the table has completely disappeared. What? Your hosts were in the kitchen too so where has it gone?
OK, here’s the secret of the Original Twist magic table, and strangely, to make one table disappear you need 2 tables. Every conjuring trick needs a secret prop.
To start with imagine the original floor – for me, wide lime-washed oak boards – and this is where the table starts off; at this moment it is the floor. Underneath there is a small pit just big enough to accommodate the 4 steel pillars the bases of which screw into a rectangular frame which is raised and lowered by screw jacks and an electric motor. To go techie for a moment, there is an upper frame too with big DU bushes in blocks to steady the legs. When the floor/table is raised up you don’t see a hole in the floor because immediately under the first table there is a second identical floor section with 4 holes through which the legs move. When the legs base frame comes up to the top of the pit it pushes the second floor up to exactly the right height and the illusion is complete. The table has appeared from nowhere and the floor is exactly like it was before.
Hygiene would be an issue but with a rubber backed rug over the floor the table will never have been walked on and double protection would be afforded by a tablecloth as well.
Servicing can all be done from above and would be even easier done from below if the pit had a side hatch accessed from the floor below.
There is more to this concept that the sheer theatre of it. The easy removal of a substantial table makes grand entertaining in a downsized house all very possible without having that old hat idea of a largely unused dining room.
There is a business waiting to be started here. Precast pit and frames etc waiting to be fitted to the floor. If you are interested please contact me on the form below.

More on this topic in LIST OF POSTS

Bug-R-Off bug catcher gun

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Bug-R-OffBug-R-Off Bug catcher
Spiders, scorpions, wasps, creepy leggy things; Bug-R-Off gets them all.

The Original Twist bug catcher enables any bug in the house to be captured with a single press of a trigger. It works like a one shot Hoover with a spring loaded piston causing an air blast to move the bug from a wall to inside the bug viewer.
The bug catcher is a short clear plastic tube with a funnel shaped trap at the front to enclose the bug and a cylinder off the side where the bug ends up after firing. The side cylinder is also clear plastic and incorporates a magnifying glass for better bug inspection.
The firing sequence. The piston has to be pulled to the front with a pull rod until it locks on the trigger stop. The pull rod is then pushed back into the gun and only then does an interlock allow the trigger to be pressed. When the trigger is pressed a spring pulls the piston back into the body of the gun and the vacuum causes air to enter the funnel trap and blast the bug into the gun too. Perforations at the back of the gun regulate the back pressure air and a twist collar can set the power from ‘Kill’ to ‘Kind’. There is a small hole at the very back of the gun which allows air to escape from the damper chamber which is simply where the back end of the piston ends up coming to a soft stop.
Just as the piston comes to a stop it uncovers the entrance to the bug viewer; the bug slams into the angled face of the piston and is deflected into the bug viewer along with some of the moving air. The entrance port to the bug viewer has some bendy hairs which give way to the bug and air but spring back to prevent the bug climbing out. After that the bug can be inspected and ejected by removing the bug viewer canister.

You saw it on Original Twist first. If you wish to use this design please get in touch using the contact form.