Convenient though they may be, [Trevor Faber] found some serious shortcomings in shifting spanners: their worm gears are slow to adjust and prone to jamming, they don’t apply even force to all faces of a bolt head, and without a ratchet, they’re rather slow. To overcome these limitations, he designed his own adjustable ratchet wrench. […]
Here’s a novel ratchet mechanism developed by researchers that demonstrates how a single object — in this case a gear shaped like a six-pointed star — can rectify the disordered energy of its environment into one-way motion. The Feynman–Smoluchowski ratchet has alternating surface treatments on the sides of its points, accomplished by applying a thin […]