Hmm... beveled glass and oak you say... Hmm, could be, could be...
Anyhow, I've been beavering away for a few days now with the freshly cut new batch of geas, and just today I've managed to crack the moon anomoly gearing - this little group of four gears slowly rotating on a much larger gear is quite a big deal for those 'in the know'. It's what set the scientific community alight when it was first discovered on the original machine back in the 70's. Is a complicated little set up with 4 gears, all with 50 teeth, that simply drive one another, but via a clever pin and slot mechanism to provide a variable speed output, and two of the gears share a near common pivot point but with different centres... tricky...
'So what does it do?', you may be asking. Well, in a nutshell, it accurately shows the moon natural tenancy to speed up and slow down as it orbits the Earth. Doesn't sound like much, but on a machine that's over 2000 years old, and to do this little trick with a long term accuracy which means that it's predictions of the moons position and phase are correct hundreds of years into the future is, well, nothing short of stunning.
Sorry - starting to get a little over enthusiastic there... won't happen again...
More soon I hope.
:-)
