Page BottomThis was to be spun to provide electricity during outages, preferably by the "steam" engine run from thermal solar collectors. It's about 5ft diameter, and 6000 pounds weight.
It's been weighed, so i know it's weight. It has a solid steel shaft 10 inches in diameter where it's mounted, and tapers to 6 inches at each end, where it's got 2 double-row tapered roller bearings, each in a separate housing. The flywheel itself is a cast iron flat-belt sheave from a coal mine. I could see no cracks, and figured i could run it at some fractional multiple of 1800 rpm (the generator input shaft), and i figured it would be limited by vibration before it would be flung apart by centrifugal forces. I considered burying it in a concrete vault in a hillside, and not risking it spinning above ground. The vault would also quiet all the other machinery so as to not bother the neighbors. I had no clue that me merely existing would bother the new neighbors i'd be getting.
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