Mother's Minto Wheel: A Report

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We (and Popular Science and Solar Energy Digest and a number of other periodicals) were understandably interested, then, when Minto's Sun Power Systems in Sarasota, Florida recently announced Wally's latest Freon engine: a solar-powered wheel that turned as Freon was boiled and forced to expand from the bottom of the vertically mounted, liquid-filled rim to its top (see MOTHER NO. 38, page 96, for a further discussion of the operation of the Minto wheel).

Three or four months ago a couple of MOTHER people even flew down to Sarasota to see Sun Power Systems' six-foot model of the wheel run on nothing but the energy it received from the solar rays reflected on it by a mirror (see photos to the left of this text).

Well . . . the wheel turned, that was for sure. But we still weren't absolutely certain that it would do any useful work. So we called Steve Baer out in Albuquerque, who told us, "We've fooled around with the concept and the wheel will turn and it'll make other things turn but it won't really do the kind of useful work that we've come to expect from our engines."

And then we began to get letters and phone calls from all kinds of people who had seen our little article in MOTHER NO. 38. "God bless you for promoting this new energy source," said some of the correspondence. "You rip-off artists! Whatta ya mean promoting that piece of junk," said others.

So, in the interest of delving deeper into the workings of something that could arouse such widely differing opinions in our audience, we decided to build a 22-foot-tall Minto wheel of our own and test it.

Result: At least based on our experiments, Steve Baer was right. The wheel will turn and it will do useful work (if you call lifting Dennis Burkholder off the ground as shown to the right "useful work"). It'll even break two-by-fours in two (as we found out) when you stick them through its spokes in an effort to stop the turning of the monster. And it'll run a cement mixer (which we just happened to have handy in the shop and which we hooked up with a rope "belt" to our wheel).

But the dang thing turns over so slowly. (We were shooting for a one-revolution-per-minute speed with our 22-foot wheel loaded with Freon 12 . . . but the close-to-250-pounds-per-square-inch pressure we were getting in the tanks was too scary. So we switched to Freon 11 . . . which cut our operating pressures down to 48 pounds per square inch . . . and the wheel's rpm to one every five minutes!)

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