Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #49737 in Books
• Published on: 2008-07-14
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 124 pages

Synopsis
This compendium of ingenious mechanisms employs simple drawings to explain 507 of the small components that constitute complex machinery. Left-hand pages feature illustrations, and facing pages offer brief descriptions of use and operation. Ranging from simple to complex, the mechanisms include cranks, pulleys, drills, wheels, and screws.

Customer Reviews

Superb inventiveness
I bought this for reference for building mechanical toys to get some ideas for mechanical movement! It is an excellent book of engineering inventiveness! Incredibly it was first published in 1868 !! As stated, the left hand pages are diagrams with explanations on the right side.
It almost becomes like a game trying to figure out what the movement of the differnt diagrams achieve then checking the right side to see if you're right! At a little over a fiver its a snip at the price and worth having!

Poor copy of an old book
Very poor quality graphics and text - this looks like set of photocopied pages from an ancient book and doesn't seem to have been altered in any way. The cover gives totally the wrong impression. Cheap, but not at all what I expected.

A treasure trove of almost-forgotten knowledge
If you are a tinkerer, hobbyist, engineer, eco-warrior, steampunk, or Fred Dibnah then this book is a fantastic reference of some basic and not-so-basic mechanical contrivances from the industrial revolution, compiled and annotated seemingly by Raffles & Bunny from the pages of Viz. I enjoyed little digs next to some illustrations such as "French version" or "Improvement of Foreign design".

Very useful if you're making any sort of machinery and suffer from "Engineers block". Eco-warriors or those living the Good Life will find an invaluable collection of water wheels, fruit presses, mills, pumps, etc.

Also 1800 Mechanical Movements, Devices and Appliances (Dover Science Books) is a slightly later, much-expanded version which contains a lot more, including furnaces & steam engines and even gasoline engines and electricity generators.

For the real anoraks out there, you can even spot some early mentions of engineering icons such as the original Mr Otis's patented safety elevator mechanism.