Hi,

Long time Model Engineer subscriber, first time poster :).  Hopefully this is the right forum for this post.

Recently, I was reading through Richard L Hills “Power from Steam”, and “Power in the Industrial Revolution”.  The books are wonderful, but it’s sometimes difficult to build an intuition for the concepts from static pictures.  That led me to do a deep dive into the beam engine: how it works, the history behind it, and the engineering tradeoffs the builders faced.  The article has quite a few interactive figures that I hope make the concepts easier to see.

Article: https://glinscott.github.io/beam-engine/

The engine is based on this great CAD model: https://grabcad.com/library/horizontal-beam-engine-1, which is in turn based on https://www.ajreeves.com/model-engineer-beam-engine-me-beam.html.  I rigged it on OnShape, and wrote a custom exporter so the article could show the different mechanisms clearly.

I would be very grateful for any corrections or feedback.

Thanks,
Gary