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Weight Wings
And work your way up to human-powered flapping flight | |
The Christmas season has provided me with the extra time at
home
to experiment with my regular excersize routine which normally
includes four or five songs from the Michael Jackson Pandora
station,
push-ups during advertisements and lots of free-style and
exaggerated dance steps. I had tried
it with weights before
because
it provides a better upper body workout but hadn't really gotten
into
a groove with it until this vacation when the extra time let me do
a
good half hour with the weights to an extended mashup of MJ's
greatest dance tunes. There is a math to the way the weights go
around the room that allows you to just sort of follow the path of
the weights and contribute only a minimum of energy to keep the
attached to your hands as they fly around the room. It reminded
me of this idea that I don't think I have contributed to the
halfbakery before:
Weight Wings.
Put little foam wings on the hand weights that provide more of an
opportunity for adaptive aerodynamicism during your dance
routine,
and then grow the wings, through experiment, from there. You
could add in little mini-weights on springs for some gyroscoping
energy-storage action if the fancy strikes you. 90 days later,
wallah,
human-powered flapping flight, tighter abs, a rocking hard core,
and
a greater appreciation for the funk, all in one package. Merry
Christmas.
You mentioned funk and human flight...
http://t.nbcnews.co...g-flight-6C10611810
More like rock ballad and human flight thoug [4whom, Jan 02 2014]
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Umm...there's a little more to flying than just flapping your
wings. |
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Human bone density, for instance. Our bones are solid and
strong and heavy, but not so strong that the amount of
muscle power required to flap wings big enough to get our
big heavy bone-filled bodies off the ground wouldn't cause
those bones to splinter like Wal-Mart toys on December
27th. |
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Or perhaps let's talk flight dynamics; bird's wings are
dynamic, skewing and flexing in ways engineers have yet to
completely replicate in a working model. Without that
ability to so radically yet precisely alter the shape of your
big foam wings you'll just be another guy running around
wearing big foam wings telling everyone you're about to
take flight. |
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But please don't let my curmudgeonly cynicism dampen
your enthusiasm. Have fun with your holiday dance party. |
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The breast-bone of a bird sticks out from the rib cage
significantly, so that the wing muscles attached to it
have a better leverage. Humans lack that significant
feature/advantage, with respect to flapping flight. |
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Two common pieces of gym equipment are the assisted pull-up
and assisted dip machines. Why couldn't an assisted flying
machine be made? You wouldn't be able to fly around the
gym, but you could get a little feeling of self-propelled
lift-off. |
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Space is usually at a premium in gyms though, and given
that even assisted flying machines would need big wings,
space would be a constraint. |
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Forget skeletal density, as near as I can tell, avian
muscles are about half as dense as human for the
same proportional strength. In addition, those
muscles are primarly located in the chest,
anchoring the wings, whereas human upper body
muscle is much more present in the arms. This
means the arms are better for manipulation, but
not as strong swinging from the shoulder. |
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Thus, additional arm muscle development is going
to make it even harder to fly. |
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So these are arm AND leg wings. Most of the power is going
to come from torque between to upper and lower half of
the body. And the energy storage
springs can be designed into the wing to help with power --
either several large halteres-type energy-storing gyros or a
bendy gyro-component at every articulation - maybe even
in every cell. Have I put an idea for one-piece gyro chain
mail in here yet? |
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//there's a little more to flying than just flapping your
wings. |
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Ach, go tell it to the birds. |
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And four winged dinosaurs (and bugs I think) came before
the two winged kind. The two wing design with "birdy legs"
facilitates soaring rather than flapping flight. |
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Peripherally, in regards to birdy legs, a weight lifter friend
of mind once pointed to my cut-off jean shorts and said,
"JHC, you have a string hanging from your shorts there, oh
no sorry that's your leg," so I might not be the right person
to actually attain air with this method, but I plan to get
lots of excersize on the way there. |
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I like the idea of using air drag to increase what resistance is possible by calisthenics itself. Perhaps a suit with louvers which open to catch air and slow any movement by the wearer. The faster you try to dance wearing it, the slower you'd be able to. |
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It would be like exercising under water. |
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<<2 fries>>
I have been working on the body motion for this at least for
the upper body and can say the following thus far: it could
be a combination of the crawl and doggy paddle strokes,
and use leverage between the hand, elbow and shoulder,
and the wings could start coiled aroun your arm and then
unfurl as the stroke gets going. I'll send a video once I can
find someone who can stop laughing long enough to hold
the camera. I wonder what the most effective leg stroke
and wing shape would be. I am thinking crawl/back/doggy,
not butter/fly. |
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Legs should be one wing molded together and using a kick
stroke. I been doing 20 minutes a morning to music, feet in
place, without weights just swinging my arms back and
forth and trying to catch as much air as possible, you get a
good sense of the shape of the air around you and how it
swirls. Thinking the next step would be hand held sticks
with foam flags duck taped in a down-folded curl. The
frame might end up looking like a narrow coil that wraps
around your body ending in a backwards coiled broader coil
spine of the wing that was folded more loosely around your
body and could unfurl whe caught by the air. |
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I am happy that someone won that prize (link). I wonder is
there some way to
integrate the energy storage and distribution into the
structure of the device -- instead of using berrings and
pulleys, distribute down to the articulations/cells -- make
the structure so that the motion is more
3D and bendy/springy so full human body motion can be
translated into the surrounding air. |
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