Flight of the Flywheels

The flywheels started to roll back and gather speed. Everything was happening in slow motion. There were one, two, three revolutions of the wheels. I felt sick as disaster was in the making. One flywheel dropped off a stone retaining wall; the flywheel rolled end over end and headed in a new direction, to my great surprise, of 90 degree parallel to the cliff edge.

Well, it was very nice to be alive, but we were now further away and 10 feet lower than before with one shattered flywheel. We called it an early day and headed for home, several hours drive away.

Blessings come in several forms. If the wheels had rolled into the canyon, I would have walked away from the project. I'd had a major setback, but was not defeated. That evening my wife and I completed a project we had worked on for more than a year, and our son was born. But that's another story in itself.

A few weeks later, I was back with new equipment and tactics. What I thought was my strongest piece of equipment had been the part that had failed me. It was inch cable end , that had not been properly joined to the connector. The cable end was not frayed when the hot metal was poured into the connector and it simply unscrewed at a very low load.

Sometime later, I was showing my broken flywheel to the man I had bought the defective cable from. He said, 'If I had known you were going to use it, I would have told you the connection was defective.' What was he thinking?

The engine, I suppose, could be run on one flywheel, but two would be nice.

If you could help me get this work-horse running again, please call or write. My phone is (520) 882-7073.