To Track or Not To Track

[TomW]

Volvo;

About the only counterbalance that might work with that extreme tracking is if the counterweight stuck out to the rear on an arm? If that makes sense?

Then it would tend to offset the weight regardless of which way it is fully tracked?

Just an idea

Cheers.

TomW

[RP]

Ideally you'd have a stick pointing straight out the back of the pivot point with a weight on it.  It would look somewhat like the tail on a windmill.  When the weight is correct, the whole assembly would be balanced.

Think of the way the hands of a clock are (or used to be) made.  In order to compensate for the weight of the long pointy "hand", there is a short wide "stub" directly opposite.  By being balanced by the counterweight, there is no force applied to the shaft.

The same thing is done for those single blade windmills.  One long blade and a short heavy counterweight.

With the right amount of weight you could position it at any angle and it would stay right where you put it (except for wind effects of course).

[TomW]

RP;

Heh, great minds think alike!

Cheers.

TomW

[Bigwheel]

Well, Still not small enough for some of you, Sorry about that.  You'd think I'd have this camera figured out, just need to spend some more time with it.  Was hoping to post some pictures like Volvo Farmers one.  That size would be nice.  Anyhow, enjoy.  Chad

[Mary B]

Ham radio operators who use big dish antennas (16 + feet) to bounce signals off the surface of the moon do just that. A counterweight out the back. It helps stabilize the whole thing in high winds too.

[Bigwheel]

HI Again,

I must of been sleeping in class on the discussion of picture size.  I was hopeing someone could walk me through the procedure.  I'm not to computer savy when it comes to these problems.  Once I'm shown,  I usually don't forget.  I, like some others, do really well from learning from others through pictures.  Just seems to work better for me I guess.  Again, thanks for the comements and help toward resolving picture posting.  Thanks chad

[Volvo farmer]

You need a program like Adobe Photoshop. If you don't have that one, there's all sorts of free photo editing software available for download.

Open the pictures in the photo editor,  resize them to 640x480, or smaller, and make sure they're less than 100K when you're done. Photoshop lets me use this little quality slider when I save, selecting a worse quality reduces the file size.

[DamonHD]

Often you'll see something like a 'Save For Web' option which will show you the file size and let you twiddle the output quality to get the file size down without hurting the pic too much.

Rgds

Damon