Leonardo Machine Project

As an engineer, Leonardo had detailed ideas for inventions that were way ahead of his time. He had conceptual blueprints for modern machines such as helicopters, armored fighting vehicles similar to tanks, cannons, musical instruments similar to pianos and calculators. Being a polymath, he had a vast knowledge in anatomy, astronomy, engineering, optics, and hydrodynamics.

Leonardo was a master of mechanics, making inventions that utilize leverage and cantilevering, pulleys, cranks, gears which includes angle, rack and pinion gears; parallel linkage, lubrication systems and bearings. He understood concepts of physics such as momentum, centripetal force and friction and applied them to everyday machines and tools. We saw some of these in the Leonardo Da Vinci museum: the screw press for oil, the compound hoist and the hammer winch, and the Science museum in Milan: a water mill, a printing press and self-propelled cart. The only reasons why Leonardo’s inventions weren’t completely constructed during his time were because they were too expensive to make or that they were impractical with the technology available during his time. It is baffling to think that Leonardo Da Vinci was able to think of these mechanisms during his time, designs that still apply to engineering today.

The Leonardo machine that mainly influenced Ceci and me in our drawing machine was the screw press for oil. It is mainly operated with a long lever that is supported on the other side by a counterweight. When the lever is cranked, a cage-like gear triggers a larger gear that causes the screw to move. For our project, we thought we could attach spoons filled with paint to the screw so that as we are cranking the lever, the paint would fly off the spoon and onto the paper underneath. Next, we thought of Leonardo’s use of hammers in the hammer winch, where a hammer is used to knock on the keys attached to a gear. The machine is mainly used to pick up heavy materials connected to a rope, be we decided to use it to hit the spray paint nozzle.

It was said that the source of enough pressure or weight was a tricky problem for Leonardo in his inventions. Ceci and I also had a hard time figuring out the correct amount of weight that would hit the spray can in correct way with a hammer. In our minds, the concept was simple: if the paper holding the paper was cut, it would fall and hit the spray nozzle, triggering the paint. However, at the last minute, we realized that we hadn’t considered the amount of force needed to trigger the spray paint. We attached a counterweight, a ceramic angel, to the hammer and also supported the back of the spray paint with a hard object, the horse bench, but both of these additions were not enough. Now that I think about it, it probably would have worked if we had more space for the hammer to swing, more momentum to create more centripetal force. If we had Leonardo’s knowledge of physics, we probably would have figured it out beforehand.