It looks like you’ve all decided we should push for wings. Makes sense – who knows how slow the distillation method is.

Step one is my initial power source. I’ll admit…while you were all voting I went ahead and started making it.

To start…I thought I needed a little cubbyhole below water level.

This…was a problem. Not going lie – a big problem. Turns out, when I dig that far down close to the water…it starts getting damp.

Like immediately damp – wait a few minutes there’s a full puddle at the bottom levels of damp. The obvious solution is to glue all the edges together making a sold insulated bowl…but even when waterproof it seems to fill with moisture.

My “endless” fire will break as soon as it gets even slightly near that dampness. Even if its not touching the water, just being in such a unhot and undry environment is going to kill it and this is the only chunk I have. Gotta be frugal.

So…plan two has my fire on stilts. I figured I’m going to all this work to bring water up there, might as well loop some of that final water back down to fill my boil station.

The end result looks a bit like pizza oven. I made it using my patented three step glue method. Step one, temporarily gluing a big ball of sand together using triboadhesion. Step two. Glue an outside shell. Step three. Disable the glue on the inside lump and shake it all out.

Gluing my bowl to my plate and creating a tiny little door and intake sections is easy enough. So is setting up the fire/boiling section. Top has a little hole for the steam. Middle side has a hole for water. Bottom has two holes for air.

Dead simple.

All you have to do to get a nice easily heated tray thing is to cut the bottom of a bucket and glue it to the walls.

My final addition is a single fire mana pearl placed in the center and a drop of my blood.

Might as well try and turn it into an organ right? It doesn’t seem like it could hurt.

So!

We are on the same page. All caught up – If I poor water in here…I get some steam out here.

Now we have to start on the actual hard bit.

I make a few very small feathered wings and stick them on the ends of sticks and wheels.

For science!

I have to figure out what the most effective shapes I can make with my tools are…

Wings…do not provide constant lift. They aren’t magically being pushed in one direction forever. Nonono – they need to be pushed. They need to flap. Air needs to press down on them but its even better if they push down on air…and in so doing get catapulted away with greater energy. I can blow air on one side and that pushes the “bottom” of the wing harder than it should…that’s the theory behind the limbs Ishner has at least. It makes it sound like you should be able to make a long line of spinning turbines with half blowing air, the second half providing lift chained as long as you want.

And yet annoyingly the results keep…seeming lackluster. Thefishyminer can lift reasonably heavy items with his boosted mana feathers and chad flapping technique. In comparison the early attempts at turbines…have worked? I really wish the skill gave me more feedback – but from what I can tell the constant air blowing gives me an equivalent closer to gliding than flight.

I’m not describing myself well am I? Going off tangent? Too meandering?

Let’s restart. The goal is to make the wings flap as they spin. Have them actually do the flapping motion themselves. Some sort of piston like arrangement would be best – I’m beginning to get good enough at woodwork some of these shapes aren’t totally helpless.

I feel like a mad scientist as I work – glueing together chunks of wood and chopping everything to bits…maxie has started looking a bit thirsty. I have to make sure to water her more often.

My first almost success is when I manage to make a spinning wheel type mechanism. Big old wheel the size of a plate. Peg on the top and outer side. Stick with grove down the middle of it stuck through the peg and affixed to something a bit off it…let me draw it on the sand real quick.

A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

image [https://i.imgur.com/i5TD2ec.jpeg]

Now when the wheel spins the stick moves up and down…mostly. I’m having a hard time figuring out how to stick this flapping motion on the side of a wheel – I need to get it to spin around the turbine shape as it flaps…I think I can get it done with lots of gears? Just have to stick this spinning wheel thing on a gear rotating around the inner gear…but I’ve actually set this aside for now.

This…I don’t think it counts as a piston but this old piston shape when rotated to "point" upwards, and modified a bit, gives me a good up and down motion. If I stick a wing to it…yep this has some kick! I have to actually hold it down when I hand crank it.

This is many times more force than the simple turbine example without even having proper jointed flapping!

… and yet it's less useful? Harder to work with? Rotational energy can be transferred between bits of the machine pretty easily. The current device threatens to pull itself up – and right now I’m trying to make a machine to lift water. Not a flying machine.

Scrap this for not being well thought out enough…

Back to trying to get wings to flap as they spin – I have an idea. Let me try something…

First I make a pair of offset circles. I know this has a name but I can’t for the life of me remember what it is…its like a wheel but as you spin it it gets bigger and then snaps back?

Well whatever it's called, I take this nameless 'S' wheel and stick it on the end of a pole. I then take a wing turbine and stick it on the side. Some little wheels around it…some rubber bands pulling these inwards and pulling the wings inwards as well. Now if you rotate it these should…

image [https://i.imgur.com/YpgsHhp.jpeg]

One of my wheels fell off. Let me sketch out what I was trying to do real quick…basically I wanted it to pull the wings in whenever it snapped in these two points. That clenching motion should have made the wings sort of beat…but my machining wasn’t good enough. Or my brain wasn’t good enough – one or the other. Maybe instead of two snaps, I just need one? Sort of like the outside of a spiral. One snap I can tune to happen right at the moment the wing points down? Sort of an extra boost?

I throw out attempt numero uno and quickly remake nearly the same device this time with only one 'drop'. It…sort of works and when I stick the wheel in place and start spinning the whole thing the extra flap does provide a significant little boost. Does this boost offset the cost of all this friction and moving parts? I...think it might? The rubber bands and friction of the whole gear situation can’t be doing this device any favors…but it does seem a bit better than just letting the wings be static?

I take my time remaking all the wings with tons and tons of tiny feathers – giving each spoke of this initial wheel a mana feather for extra oomph and enclosing the middle clenching mechanism in a sack with a drop of blood.

Hey, it might be a placebo effect but I swear it's making it run better.

I set this first wheel up and the end of a spoke and get to work converting my tiny whistle of steam into rotational motion boosted by wheel one.

I have to use a pair of gears to turn the fast spin of the first wheel into a slower stronger spin but I get it working.

This…doesn’t feel like enough to lift water unless it's lifting maybe a thimbleful at a time. I do now have a spinning wheel that’s just sort of running happily away so there are positives…maybe I should try the up and down motion once again?

Back to the drawing board…

What about this?

image [https://i.imgur.com/sAR1EId.png]

…its ambitious but I think if I make the piston a…tank tread of sorts and attach the wings to that tread…well then when the piston goes up the wings do nothing and when the piston comes down the wing provides a good amount of lift opposite to the motion. Stick a bucket or two on this and it should sort of pull them around up to the top? Originally I was just going to make a big water wheel. Something as big as me or bigger…but even if that is easier to build, the amount of 'work' wings can actually provide on that is…like a fraction of the total upwards motion. This setup lets half the wings work nearly optimally in a downwards facing direction and the downward half can take a break.

The tank treads are the hardest part. You would think it was the piston wheel…no, trial and error and gluing an extension (or two) on when I realized I made the straight bit too small takes care of it pretty quickly.

Yep the tank treads are hard – I use cut up strips of cloth to make a sort of band and glue sand on the inside to try and reduce friction and it sort of works…but then as soon as I try pulling it with the amount of force the thing will be running on the whole thing slips.

I try gluing small blocks of wood every inch or so around the inside and try to match it to spokes on the two outer wheels…and fail at the spacing and the wheel interface bit. Finally I convert my square blocks into prisms and my two spoked wheels into spiky wheels. This finally works – ‘V’ covered treads. ‘V’ covered wheels. I can’t help but feel like my time would have been better spent making more feathers…

Well anyways. I stuck the two together and even with a pair of wings – this is already off to a great start.

I stick a bucket at one location on my setup and watch in glee as it rises in jerky jumps – flips over near the top and rides down to pick up water.

I…am a genius!

The bucket fills halfway and immediately stops the whole machine.

I…am the dumbest.

Please let it just be a “needs more wings” sort of problem. Please. Please.

I make a dozen wings – each tipped with a mana feather to draw out their full potential. Sue me, its a lot of work adding that extra feather but in the end it boosts it as much as adding hundreds of extra feathers so I save time in the end! Girl math!

Gluing these wings about my setup I reconnect the spinning section and watch as the whole thing begins to turn.

We have motion!

Up…up…up. Flip and dump…downnn!

Scoup up more water. Up…up…up. Flip and dump! We have a system!

It works with one bucket at a time just now…relatively stable but I want to balance it with a second bucket on the opposite end…as far as I’m concerned only one bucket should be full of water at a time so it shouldn’t be too big of a deal…