Gears help

Me neither, If I get one, it is just dumb luck! I keep trying, my brain does not work that way either. Micci

We can do other things well though! I do the jigsaws super fast! Micci

Ever play whip as a kid when skating? You get a line of kids holding hands moving in a circle around one kid on the end rotating in place. The kid in the center of the circle isn't turning that fast spinning in place, whereas the kid on the far end of the line is being whipped around really fast.

When you have stacked gears the larger outer one will always travel faster than the smaller inner one.

If you want to speed up your gears, attach the smaller inner
gear to the source gear.

If you want to slow down your gears, attach the larger outer gear to the source gear.

The bigger the difference between gear sizes, the faster it will go.

If you only need a little speed up or slow down, make the gears about the same size.

Hope this helps. :o)

The fun part occurs when I increase or decrease a gear one tiny increment and - ka-ching! - the speed doubles. The final result looks reasonable, mathematically, but getting there doesn't. jfilion's guidelines will get you in the right direction.

urbangrandma, I see the most recent gear puzzle you finished is the medium Performing Arts puzzle. Are you stuck on the Week 3 OMG Performing Arts puzzle?

That's the one I'm stuck on - got all of the others. In the Week 3 OMG Performing Arts puzzle, the highest speed I've achieved is about 2/3 of what I need for a ka-ching!

If the green gear is likened to a clock, I've found 3 ways to get stuck at 6 o'clock (aka 2/3 of the speed I need):
- using all gears provided,
- using all but one dark grey gear and
- using all but one light grey gear

Whatever combination I use, my fastest gear rotates at 3 seconds per quarter turn. I figure I have to get to 2 seconds.

I'd appreciate hints on this one. Or outright solutions. I'm not fussy. Oh, ok, hints are fine.

Week 3 OMG is easy once you know the trick. The speed you are looking for is just shy of the maximum speed possible when using two stacked pairs.
One more note, if you maximize speed on both stacks and connect them they will bind up and not move. You need to reduce one of the large gears by a few teeth to keep it spinning freely.

( In last week's OMG gears, I actually managed to jam the gears in such a way that both of the target gears flipped the direction in which they needed to move! Not sure if that would have been solvable or not. I had to reset. )

Even after all the changes that Joe has made to make it simpler, I am still having difficulty, now it is with the game freezing or jamming and I have to hit that reset a few times, I managed to get two more though! only 3 to go, (BIG SIGH), I get them half way and can't go any farther, but I will keep trying. Thank you Joe for the save feature though, even the freezing and jamming don't hurt where I started! I would really give up on these if not for that. Micci

oog, after more than an hour of working on the Week 5 OMG puzzle, I am a smidge away from ka-ching! on the upper right and lower left gears. If I'm doing it right, then there's a hint in the sizing of the gears at the start of the puzzle: three dark-grey and one light-grey gears are tiny. For a reason.

RE the Week 4 OMG gear puzzle. @jfilion, I'm a tad baffled. Because I'm able to stack only light grey onto dark grey, your reply implies both light grey gears are needed. In this puzzle, the light grey gears only mesh with each other and the green gear. To my eyes, the stacked light greys go fastest when the dark greys under them are smallest.

Yet if the stacks are to bind up, the light greys need to be rotating in opposite directions. The only way I can find to do that is to separate the stacks with a dark grey. But that makes one of the light greys extraneous, thus needing only one light grey - or one stack - to Ka-ching!

Am I missing something here?

delos, I was referring to the Week 3 OMG for meshing the 2 stacks to maximize speed. Reverse the colors on the second stack so the light grey is the small gear.

Week 4 OMG, you only create 1 stack and use the light grey gears to drive one and the dark grey gears to drive the other.

Oh, yeah, sorry, I meant Week 3 OMG. Week 4 was no problem.

I've spent the last five hours trying to get the Week 5 OMG gears puzzle. My problems have to do with 1) the unexpected, sudden resizing and relocating of the gears when I click on the 4-way drag-and-drop arrows, 2) the intermittent, unpredictable enlargement of a gear when I click on it to highlight it, and 3) there is no longer a stopping point when I maximize or minimize a gear; e.g. when I aim to minimize a gear to its smallest diameter, a nanosecond after I've hit minimum, it suddenly enlarges to maximum.

At one point, hours ago, the black power-source gear started spinning wildly. I had connected all of the gears, nothing was jamming, when the black gear started spinning wildly, then all of the gears spun wildly and all of the gauges said "Too fast."

I changed the sizes of all of the gears to slow the gauges, but nothing mattered. I removed all of the gears from the black gear. Didn't matter. I had to click reset to get the black gear to slow down to its usual speed.

I found reset doesn't reset to the beginning of the game, but rather to the last saved version. I would have preferred to start over. The closest I came to the correct speeds was in the couple first minutes of starting.

Yes week 5 OMG has been a problem for many this week. Some of the behavior you mention is different than what other's have mentioned, but I can see why you have gotten frustrated with it. It is solvable, but for some a major pain in the rear. I didn't have the black gear speed issue, which can only be solved by reset, but I did have the jerky gear movement and problems sizing the stacked gears. I don't think the gear game is broken, just this particular one seems to be having an identity crisis of sorts.

week 3 & 5 OMG gears are the only ones I can't seem to figure out. clues?

Mikeyb68,

Week 3 gears is the "really fast" one:
http://picturetheimpossible.com/forums/support/3988

This means that you'll need two sets of stacked gears in order to achieve the speed you'll need. Since there are only two light gears, they must be part of the stacking equation - right? How do you make two stacks keep increasing speed?
You'll need a very large stacked on top of a very small connected to another very large stacked on top of a very small -- but in order to link them together, they can't be identical. Make sense?

still too slow. grrr

I'm still working on Week 5 OMG. Argh, the gears have erected force fields around themselves. It's difficult to get any two gears to connect. However, stacking is finally no problem (I used to get two "stacked" tags in a stack).

In general, I found that a minimum-sized dark grey gear stacked with a maximum-sized light grey gear spins the fastest. And that combination will make a green gear spin the fastest when that stacked gear is the one touching the green gear.

I noticed in one of the other puzzles (Week 3 OMG?) that a green gear that ka-chings easily and seems to not care what sized gears are connected to it -- it does matter what size gears are connected to it. For Week 5 OMG, the green gear that that ka-chings easily is in the upper left corner.

My question .... Is there going to be a "Solved at least 105 web puzzles" achievement, if the game ends Wednesday?

One reason that I was persisting in the Week 5 OMG was to get the extra points for the Solved 105 web puzzles achievement.

Delos,

The game doesn't end Wednesday... that's just the cutoff for the 150 for the gala. There is still this week's challenge for teams to distribute the charitable donation for this week. Forge getting 2nd is worth $200 more for Foodlink!

Plus, there is the personal glory for your final ranking to think about as well.

It's getting those Foodlink points that keeps me going.

RE the Week 5 OMG - does the solution have a somewhat symmetrical shape to it? Everything I try keeps coming back to a symmetrical shape, but upper right/lower left gears are still a smidge too slow.

I tried the reverse stacking approach ala the Week 3 OMG, but got less speed and had too few gears to connect the other gears.

hints are appreciated.

help! It'll give me something useful to do when I need to take a break from the latest decoding.

delos -

yup, you're on the right track.
Upper/right and lower/left are symmetrical with a smaller stacked gear on top of a larger one.

Please help with hints!

I tried dtrabjohns' stacked gear hint and ran into trouble

This Week 5 OMG is the only web puzzle I haven't finished. I'd love to finish it so I have a chance to get the 'completed 105 web puzzles' bonus points for the Forge.

I do not care at all about my personal score. It's all about the Forge.

Max sized gear stacked on top of small gear connected to the driver (on the bottom) and the two symmetrical stacked gears (on the top).
Both symmetrical gears connect upper/right and lower/left targets.
You should have one bottom gear left to connect to upper/left target.

More help (spoiler) on FaceBook - PTI Forge Faction

Thank you, drabjohns! It worked.

I had tried that pairing of large-bottom/small-top with a small bottom/large-top weeks ago, but I had given up on it due to the enormous difficulty in dragging the stacked gears even 1/4 of an inch across the screen and the strong force fields preventing spinning gears from touching stacked gears. I almost threw my computer out the window on this Week 5 OMG.

Thanks to your hint, I tried again.

On to Week 7 Gears!

Thanks you guys for posting the gears, helped a lot! Between that and all of Janice's coaching, I actually did start to GET IT! Micci