andypugh Posted August 5, 2015 Share Posted August 5, 2015 Looking at pictures of "Big Lizzie" I was inspired to speculate on whether anything is still out there running on Dreadnaught wheels (also in some books called the Boydell Endless Railroad) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dreadnaught_wheel I imagine that the design introduces some NVH concerns. Has anyone ridden on them? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
nz2 Posted August 5, 2015 Share Posted August 5, 2015 A few tractors are about with this wheel set up. I'm sure I have some photos of one in the South Island ( NZ) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Hair Bear Posted August 5, 2015 Share Posted August 5, 2015 The tractor version were called 'Rotapeds'. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
andypugh Posted August 7, 2015 Author Share Posted August 7, 2015 The tractor version were called 'Rotapeds'. Looking on the Internet the Rotaped system is rather more modern (1941) and seems to be somewhere between a Caterpillar Track and a Dreadnaught Wheel Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tony B Posted August 7, 2015 Share Posted August 7, 2015 Apparently the Megatherium was a prehistoric giant , elephant sized, sloth. Wonder if the original namer was thinking of Hyraxatherium, the first horse? (long tale about THAT name, but only of intrest to Hippophiles) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
andypugh Posted August 10, 2015 Author Share Posted August 10, 2015 (edited) Apparently the Megatherium was a prehistoric giant , elephant sized, sloth. Wonder if the original namer was thinking of Hyraxatherium, the first horse? To stray off the subject of vehicles completely, I suspect that Megatherium might have been in general use for "Huge" at the time. According to the Wikipedia article it was the largest animal known to have lived until the discovery of the dinosaurs. This Google Ngram shows the history of the popularity of the word. https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=megatherium&year_start=1780&year_end=2000&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2Cmegatherium%3B%2Cc0 The Crimean war was 1853-56. Megatherium was discovered in 1788, and at the time of the Crimean war the only dinosaurs known (again, according to Wikipedia) were relatively small. Well, if you can call an Iguanodon small... "Jumbo" appeared in London some time around 1880, s that word wasn't available. They might have called it the "Mammoth War Horse" (I think that mammoth had been known about since antiquity) but perhaps that didn't have the same ring. Hyracotherium was relatively tiny, and (as far as I can see) wasn't linked to the horses until the discovery of Eohippus in 1876. Edited August 10, 2015 by andypugh Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tony B Posted August 10, 2015 Share Posted August 10, 2015 Off track entirely, Eohippus, The beautifully named Dawn Horse, was the second set of fossils found of the creature. There was another set wrongly assumed to be a rabbit, and named Hyracotherium. So according to the convention Bugs Bunny rules. :mad: Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
andypugh Posted August 10, 2015 Author Share Posted August 10, 2015 Off track entirely, Eohippus, The beautifully named Dawn Horse This thread is so far off-track that it will never find its way back, so just one final link to a poem I heard parts of as a child. http://www.bartleby.com/380/poem/222.html Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
nz2 Posted August 10, 2015 Share Posted August 10, 2015 The movement by some members towards such a branch of thought on this forum topic clearly shows the wide range of backgrounds and knowledge out there. We are not stuck in little boxes but prepared to view what is about us and comment on these side issues. That is what I find makes this forum interesting and informative. On this topic it has become the origin of the terminology. Informative. Now aside from the Big Lizzie wheels, are there other examples remaining on large items of machinery? Wasn't the same form of track laying wheel used for the 1908 War Dept trials. I seem to recall seeing some photos of the type being used on a beach for the trials. Doug Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Recommended Posts
Join the conversation
You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.