Any bullets which hit it were deflected to one side. Shown here is a propeller with the wedges mounted at the correct radial distance from the center and with tiebars for bracing. This one was used by Roland Garros in April as a backup for the synchronization approach I talk more about below. But besides putting a strain on the engine, deflectors caused another problem.
The propeller blades were typically made of laminated wood and the impacts, despite being deflected away by the steel deflectors, would cause the glue to weaken and the layers to separate. It was therefore preferable to avoid hitting the propeller. Syncronization was the answer to avoid having bullets hit the propeller. One of the earliest mechanisms devised was the Fokker Stangensteuerung gear. The cam was aligned to only fire when the path for the bullet was clear. The video below of a museum exhibit shows the mechanism in action but there are some subtleties which the following diagrams make clear.
Enabling the cam follower: The system included an enabler mechanism that disconnects the cam follower to minimize wear. As long as the coupling piece is pivoted upward, the push rod and coupling piece are prevented from pushing on the gun trigger.
Using the pilot trigger lever: When the pilot wished to fire the gun, he pushes on the trigger lever which pivots the coupling piece down.
Note that depending on where the cam is in its rotation, the gun trigger may be in the way of the coupling piece pivoting down as it is in the first diagram. When the bump pushes the cam follower up, the cam follower pushes the push rod toward the pilot, in turn pushing on the coupling piece which pushes on the gun trigger which fires a round in the gun.
The following video shows the synchronization gear of a German single-seat Fokker E-type monoplane. This is from an exhibit once on display in the Canada Aviation and Space Museum and simulates all the above actions as well as showing how things are restored to a non-combat stance after a battle.
Temperature changes in the metal rods caused thermal expansion which resulted in their changing length. With such tight timing requirements, this would fire the bullet either sooner or later enough to hit a propeller blade. Propeller speeds also varied during the flight.
Even the distance the bullet had to travel was an issue with low muzzle-velocity guns and when the travel distance was sufficiently large.
With some systems, the pilot had to keep an eye on the tachometer indicating the engine speed to know when it was safe to fire. If all the above could be solved, many attempts to build synchronizers still failed due to the unreliable timing of many makes of gun.
Even inaccuracies in bullet manufacturer meant that some bullets would fire at the wrong time, hitting a propeller blade. Many synchronizer designs were developed during the war, some which introduced improvements. This carried the rotation up to the gun itself. Timing adjustments could now be done at the gun instead of at a single cam on a propeller shaft.
This was especially useful when multiple guns were used in order to maximize the chances of hitting a critical part of the enemy plane. A separate flexible drive shaft was run up to each gun. Since each gun had slightly different timing, this meant that each could be adjusted individually. Also, should one gun fail, the others would still work. Yet other means of synchronizing with the propeller position were electrical, using contacts around the propeller shaft to activate a solenoid at the gun trigger, and hydraulic.
A modern implementation by a hacker would of course use a microcontroller and an airsoft gun. A number of things brought about the end of synchronizers. More powerful bombers used heavier armor for vital areas which rifle-caliber machine guns were unable to penetrate.
The switch from cable-braced wings to the more rigid cantilever wings meant that guns could be mounted on the wings instead. And of course, the eventual introduction of jet engines meant there were no more propellers to fire through. The final synchronized guns were used during the Korean war in the early s.
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Don't show this again. Daily morning newsletter. Afternoon video roundup. Long Reads. Synchronization gear was invented in , allowing pilots to shoot through the arc of a spinning propeller without their bullets striking the blades. The Slow Mo Guys slow down the effect and catch the mechanism in action. Want more videos like this?
The pandemic has been a near-perfect mass hair-loss event. Gaffigan is right, you can eat butter without mixing it with lobster. How Adele turned heartache over her divorce into her most honest album yet. She's gotten too many of mine already. They sent a pilot named Ostwald Boelke up to try it out. Boelke went on to become Germany's first ace.
Fokker went back to making the advanced German airplanes that killed thousands of Allied pilots throughout the war. The Allies called his mechanism The Fokker Scourge. After the war, we used Fokker's commercial airplanes here in America. My father, a newspaper writer, had been a pilot in France during WW-I.
He met Fokker here. Later he told me what a thoroughly pleasant fellow he'd found Fokker to be. I'm John Lienhard, at the University of Houston, where we're interested in the way inventive minds work. This is a substantially revised version of Episode 7. A page from the Marlin Machine Gun Manual. By now the Allies also had interrupter machine guns.
Lienhard Click here for audio of Episode Today, we meet a nice young man and his killing machines. The University of Houston's College of Engineering presents this series about the machines that make our civilization run, and the people whose ingenuity created them. Fokker tells what happened next, in his autobiography: They handed him the plane late on a Tuesday afternoon.
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