Mill wheel

“ The fly driving wheel is 35 feet in diameter, and grooved for twenty-seven ropes, which transmit the power direct to the various line shafts in the mill. The rope grooves are made on Hick, Hargreaves & Co.'s standard pattern of deep groove, and the wheel, which is built up, is constructed on their improved plan with separate arms and boss, and twelve segments in the rim with joints planed to the true angle by a special machine designed and made by themselves. ”

“ With a well-constructed automatic mill of from two to five horse, such work could probably be performed with less trouble than in any other way. The only expense after the first cost is that for repairs and lubrication, neither of which is large. The power of any wheel depends, of course, on the velocity of the wind. They are usually rated with the wind at twenty miles an hour, and on this basis the powers of those made range from one eighth to forty horse, the smaller size being eight and a half feet in diameter and the latter sixty. ”

“ For these revolving vanes were something to be respected—a 60-foot wheel, for instance, weighing several tons and having a periphery speed of perhaps 3000 feet a minute, and more than one horse or cow straying into the path of the arms in a mill in operation has been struck and paid the penalty. ”

“ Just inside the front wall of the mill the windshaft rests in a metal bearing, and next to it is the large gear wheel, known as the “brake wheel,” that can be seen when one looks up through the trap door from the mill’s little back platform. The platform, incidentally, was not unusual in post mills, although it was often a convenience added after the mill was built and on which the miller could enjoy a pipe and a moment of repose while the mill ground merrily away. ”

“ The single wheel, without any indication of an utilitarian employment, is found directly associated with the pole-star in Japan, where, as in China, the use of the wheel has been known from earliest [pg 502] times. It will be for Scandinavian archaeologists to enlighten us as to the earliest traces of the use, by northern races, not only of the wheeled chariot, familiar to those who named Ursa Major, Thor's wagon, but also that of the mill-stone. ”

“ The failure of any of the parts during a high wind would endanger the safety of the wheel, and perhaps cause its destruction. The second form of mill, that using the vane-governor, is much simpler in construction, has fewer parts, and is consequently more durable. ”

“ The advantage of the three-high mill is that, because each of its moving parts is always moving in the same direction, it may be driven by a relatively small and hence cheap engine, the power delivered by which between the passes is taken up by a powerful fly-wheel, to be given up to the rolls during the next pass. ”

“ In later years they made use of a further rig of chains and tackle and a wheel like a pilot’s, which enabled the snubbing around of the vanes and cap to be done far more easily than by pushing by hand alone. This old tail beam is, however, characteristic of the old-time small mill, and many are the tracks, well worn and circular, around the mill that betoken the{182} years of labor of the miller, even if eased by an old cartwheel to carry the end of the beam, as instanced in the well-known old mill at Nantucket and elsewhere. ”

“ Though this figure is small, and though it gives very little idea of the internal construction, one may, however, conclude from it that the roller, whether it was of wood or of iron, smooth or notched, did not stand perpendicularly, like those of our coffee mills, but lay horizontally, which gives us reason to conjecture a construction more ingenious than that of the first invention. The axis of the handle had, perhaps, within the body of the mill, a crown wheel, that turned a spindle, to the lower end of the perpendicular axis of which the roller was fixed. ”

“ There is not the slightest reason why the spinning wheel may not co-exist with the spinning mill even as the domestic kitchen co-exists with the hotels. Indeed typewriters and sewing machines may go, but the needle and the reed pen will survive. ”

“ A striking instance is that of a pair of cast-iron helical wheels, 6 ft. 3 in. diameter, 12 in. wide, making 220 revolutions per minute, the speed of the pitch line being 4,319 feet per minute; these wheels are running continuously and with little noise. There is also a cut gear in a mill in Massachusetts, 30 feet in diameter, and the speed of pitch line is 4,670 feet per minute.
Fig. 272.
An internal or annular gear wheel is one in which the faces of the teeth are within and the flank without the pitch circle, hence the pinion operates within the wheel. See fig. ”

“ They are then heated and shrunk on to the circular parts and crank pins of the axle, and finally secured by round plugs screwed into the joints in a direction parallel to the length of the axle. Wheel Centres. The term “wheel centre” refers to that portion of the wheel which includes the central boss, and the spokes and rim, but does not include the axle or tyre. Wheel centres are now generally made of cast steel. They are turned outside, and also bored for the axles either in a wheel lathe, or—more conveniently—on the revolving table of a horizontal boring mill of the type shown in Fig. ”

“ The length of these arms in an ordinary size mill was about 30 feet, giving a diameter to the wheel of 60 feet; but in the big tower mills referred to the arms were sometimes 50 and 60 feet long, making the wheels well over 100 feet in diameter. The{180} usual speed was about 16 revolutions a minute. If faster than 20 a danger point was reached that was very real, for there have been many cases of runaway mills, resulting from defective brakes or accident or carelessness; in which accidents millers have been caught in the vanes or sweeps and carried around and around and thrown off ”

“ The perch, axle-trees, and carriage timbers have been reduced to thin sticks. The four wheels are made so slender as to resemble a spider’s web; in their construction of the wheels the principle of the patent rim used in England in 1790 has been adopted. Instead of five, six, or seven felloes to each wheel, there are only two, of oak or hickory wood, bent to the shape by steam. The ironwork of the American buggy is very slender, yet composed of many pieces, and, in order to reduce the cost, these pieces of iron are mostly cast, not forged, of a sort of iron less brittle than our cast iron.... ”

“ As philosophy advances, life and activity in natural objects retires, and leaves them dead and inactive. Instead of moving voluntarily, we find them to be moved necessarily; instead of acting, we find them to be acted upon; and Nature appears as one great machine, where one wheel is turned by another, that by a third; and how far this necessary succession may reach, the philosopher does not know. ”

“ Apparently agitated at the idea of reviving the home industries, he exclaims, "The real question for consideration with us or with any people to-day is not whether the handloom will or will not be able to hold its own against the power loom, or whether it cannot feed millions of families or clothe millions more in home-made-dress; but which will contribute to the economic and political power of a nation or country, whether it is the handloom or the power-mill? Handicrafts or machine industries—that is the real issue." ”

“ While still hot, a workman files the sawn ends so that they may fit together closely when laid down on the sleepers. The completed rails are then stacked for removal on trucks to their destination. The rollers which turn out these rails in so regular and beautiful a manner are driven by a pair of engines of enormous power. The huge fly-wheel is twenty feet in diameter, and weighs, with its axle, thirty-five tons. ”

“ Why should it not be enough to distribute raw cotton among those who need clothing? Why this, hypocritical or false alarm about the dearth of cloth, when it is possible in India to manufacture enough for India’s needs in a month even without the aid of the mills? The people have been purposely or ignorantly kept in the dark hitherto. They have been wrongly taught to believe, that all the cloth needed cannot be manufactured in India’s homes as of yore. They have been figuratively amputated and then made to rely upon foreign or mill-made cloth. ”

“ And just as in spite of every home having its own kitchen, restaurants continue to flourish, so will mills continue to supply our additional wants. But even as because of our private kitchens we would not starve if every restaurant was through some accident closed, so would we, by reason of domestic spinning, not have to be naked even if every mill, by a blockade from the west, had to stop work. ”

“ There is nothing like a wheel in nature. Levers we have in our own physical frame. But a wheel is something that is distinctly a human creation. Whoever invented it must have been a real genius, a James Watt or a Thomas Edison of his day. Certainly we owe more to the invention of the wheel than we do even to so revolutionary a machine as the steam engine, or the flying machine. ”

“ Maybe this primeval genius got his idea from seeing a stone rolling downhill, or he may have seen a tumbling weed rolling along the ground before the wind. It may be that the forerunner of the wheel was a roller shaped out of a log, for certainly primitive civilization must have advanced enough to have known how to hew timber before it would have been capable of fashioning a wheel. Some observant man might have noticed that he could drag a heavy [17] timber over a rolling log much more easily than he could along the bare ground, and gradually the roller evolved into a wheel. ”

“ The flint-like grains from the desert blow over the rails, and as the cars move they grind out the steel as though they were emery powder. Consequently, the life of a wheel is short, and we have to cut down its tire every few months. Moreover, the sand gets into the bearings, and there is a continual wearing which necessitates almost constant repair. ”

“ Portugal the old classic bullock-cart on this principle is still to be seen, and it has been reasonably guessed that such carts tell the story how wheel-carriages came to be invented. Rollers were early used, on which a block of stone or other heavy weight was trundled. Suppose such a roller made of a smoothed tree-trunk to be improved by cutting the middle part smaller, so that it became an axle and pair of broad wheels in one piece, then by making this axle work underneath the rudest framework, the simplest imaginable wheel-carriage is made. ”

“ The action of long rigid wheel-base vehicles passing [Pg 54] round sharp curves is detrimental to all the parts brought into contact. Not only is there the constant tendency to mount the rails, and spread the gauge, but the tiny shreds of steel scattered all along close to the rail—particles ground off the rails, or off the wheel-tyres, or both—testify to useless wear, unnecessary friction, and great waste of motive-power. ”

“ Of the built-up wheels, the strong forged-iron-spoke wheel with steel tyres shows excellent results, and always gives due warning of loosening by indications at the tyre rivets. The suddenness with which the solid wooden centre wheels sometimes break up and fall to pieces does not commend them for a service where there must be a long-sustained application of the brakes. ”

“ They used to be drawn close by separate straps of iron applied with great labour. The wheel rests upon some raised bricks. Out from the forge rush three or four men bearing a red-hot iron hoop. It is laid upon the outer rim of the wood-work, burning its way as it is hammered down with the united force of the wheelwrights. ”

“ This national industry is capable of being revived by exertion and a change in the national taste without damaging the mill industry. Increase of mills is no present remedy for supplying the deficiency. The difficulty can be easily supplied only by hand-spinning and hand-weaving. If this employment were revived it would prevent sixty million rupees from being annually drained from the country, and distribute the amount among lacs of poor women in their own cottages. I therefore consider Swadeshi as an automatic, though partial, solution of the problem of India’s grinding poverty. ”

“ But the neatest farmers, instead of sowing at this stage of the work, employ a compressing implement formed of two parallel metal wheels at one end of an axle, and very close to each other, and a guide wheel of the same diameter at the other end. ”

“ Each step corresponds to our many-sided wheel falling on to a flat side—and the "hammer, hammer, hammer on the hard high road" is the horsey counterpart of the metallic rattle.
On rough ground a horse has a great advantage over a wheeled tractor, because it can put its feet down on the top of objects of different elevations, and still pull. A wheel cannot do this, and, as we have seen, a loss of power results. Our inventor, therefore, created in his pedrail a compromise between the railway smoothness and ease of running and the selective and accommodating powers of a quadruped. ”

“ These wheels, a large number of which are placed side by side in the same room, are made to revolve by means of machinery, with an inconceivable velocity, while the workmen who have the polishing to do, taking their stations, each at his own wheel, on seats placed there for the purpose, and holding the piece of work on which the operation is to be performed, in their hands, apply it to the revolving circumference before them. ”