How to Build a Spiral Pump

spiral pump

“A spiral pump, first invented in 1746, has been recreated and tested at Windfarm Museum using lightweight and inexpensive modern materials. A 6 foot diameter wheel with 160 feet of 1-1/4 inch inside diameter flexible polyethylene pipe is able to pump 3,900 gallons of water per day to a 40 foot head with a peripheral speed of 3 feet per second.

With its low torque requirements, the pump is particularly suited to be mounted on and driven by a paddle wheel in a current of two feet per second or greater. This easily built, low maintenance spiral pump can be used to provide water without the need for fuel wherever there is a flowing stream or river. It can also be hand turned or otherwise driven to provide a low cost, efficient pump.”

Read more: 1 / 2 / 3 / 4. Thanks to Paul Nash.

See also:

Early 20th Century Wave Power

Wave power 1“Los Angeles will be a smokeless and sootless city, clean pure. It will be made so by all the power and heating plants being supplied with power and heat from the ocean waves by the Starr Wave Motor.”

Read more: three inventors who tried to bottle the ocean’s power. Hat tip to Klaas Van Gorp.

Ship mills

Ship mills on the rhine anton woensam

Boat mills: water powered, floating factories” at Low-tech Magazine. Some extra images below:

[Read more…]

Old Watermills Turning Again

“They belong to an England that, these days, we only glimpse through Constable paintings. But old watermills could once again become a working part of the landscape under ministers’ plans to power a million homes with hydro-electricity.” Read. Via UK Windmills.

Water Powered Rope Making Machine

Water powered rope making machine

Drawing of a water powered wire mill, taken from “The Pirotechnia” by Vannoccio Biringuccio (1540). Illustration credit. For the hand powered method, see: Lost knowledge: ropes and knots.

Update January 2015: Kurt B. writes us to say that “what you are looking at is a wire drawing machine, not a rope making machine. That is, taking a large wire and drawing it through a series of ever decreasing dies (holes in the die plate) to make the wire smaller. It is powered by water. The fellow with the rope in his hands is taking up the slack on the tongs which grip the wire. Every stroke of the wheel crank pulls the wire through the die just that amount and he takes up the slack each stroke, or tries to. Here is a guy drawing wire on a much smaller scale  Home made electric jeweller wire puller  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sieNdwdCQug“.