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Barrier Lake Weyr
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Elsewhere on Pern
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Story Listing
Series Listing

Weyrling Training

Writers: Yvonne
Date Posted: 9th August 2014

Characters: J'nus
Description: After procrastinating for a while, J'nus begins designing a fan for Kapera and Cyradis
Location: Dolphin Cove Weyr
Date: month 8, day 2 of Turn 7
Notes: Mentioned: Kapera, Cyradis

A promise made to _two_ goldriders meant that J'nus felt obligated to see if he could build a fan.

The thing was, he really had no idea how to do it. He stood in the middle of his weyr, barefoot and shirtless, glaring at the pile of gears, weights, fan blades and wood heaped on his work table and wondering how he got himself into these sorts of situations. Pretty women with pretty smiles, and he a stupid old fool unable to say no.

So, sighing, he ignored the unpacked bags, the rolled up rugs against the walls and the art that should be hung on the walls, and set to work.

Earlier that day he'd sketched a diagram of the fans that swung in lazy circles above the heads of the people in the dining caverns. Presumably they'd been installed to help dissipate food smells and keep the air flowing into the kitchens, which also had their own fans that led directly to the outside. The fans were driven by a water wheel attached to the Weyr's geothermal water system, and while it was efficient, it wasn't a practical source of power to use to run a fan in a goldrider's weyr.

A smaller fan on an upright base should be easy enough to design, though. A weight suspended by cords could act as the power source. Run the cord through a series of metal gears to produce enough resistance to keep the weight falling slowly, and you could translate the power the resistance produced into a rapidly spinning axel to attach the fan blades to. The trick was finding the right ratio of gears to slow the weight without making the device overly complex. The more gears there were, the more metal teeth there were to grind together, and the noisier the fan would be.

And that was where he was a bit stumped. The theory was sound, but the design was difficult when you only had a box of mismatched, long forgotten gears scrounged from deep within the Headwoman's territory. Finding a good Smith or Technician was possible, but J'nus didn't have the marks to trade for new materials.

**Well.** He sighed, sat, then dumped the box of gears out on his work table. There were at over fifty ranging in size from the diameter of his pinky finger to the palm of his hand, all cast out of some light material. An aluminum alloy, perhaps. He began to sort them by diameter, then by size of their teeth, and soon had a series of gears laid out in neat lines across the table top.

A large gear would be best to hang the weights off. J'nus frowned at his materials for a moment, then realized that maybe what he really needed was a pulley. He could hang the weight off a pulley and attach a set of gears to the pulley's axel to slow the weight's fall and to capture the mechanical energy produced by the gear's resistance to the gravity-pulled weight. Or... no. Wrap the cord around an axel, and let the weight pull the cord and turn the mechanism. The mechanism could be slowed by a series of gears, and then sped up again to drive the fan axel. The advantage of a cord-wrapped axel was that he could give the goldriders keys to wind the mechanism up again themselves.

Perhaps the fan could be designed on a tripod, with the simple motor and fan at the peak and the weights dangling between the fan's legs. That would also be a good solution for Cyradis, who had young children who potentially enjoyed pulling things down on themselves. He could turn the legs of her fan into a triangular cabinet containing the weight.

And that was a good place to start. The bronzerider found his handsaw and a bit of charcoal and set about building a tripod. Once he had that, he could start arranging the gears and weights around it. It would be a lot of trial an error since his selection of gears was poor, but he thought it was possible.

And if he succeeded... well, there was a pair of goldriders' admiration as a reward. That, and a fan of his own, which would hopefully mean sheets that weren't quite as sweaty. He just needed to finish before the Technicians showed up-- and showed him up in the process.

Last updated on the September 7th 2014