Connecting Rods
Connecting rods are used in numerous situations, most commonly in the engines of automobiles. Connecting rods connect the crankshaft to the pistons and are necessary for the proper functioning of an internal combustion engine.
The purpose of a connection rod is to provide fluid movement between pistons and a crankshaft. Connection rods are widely used in vehicles that are powered by internal combustion engines. All cars and trucks that use this type of engine employ the use of connecting rods. Farm equipment like tractors and combines also use connecting rods. Even construction equipment like bulldozers use internal combustion engines, thus requiring connecting rods.
Connecting Rods History
The earliest evidence for a connecting rod appears in the late 3rd century AD Roman Hierapolis sawmill. It also appears in two 6th century Eastern Roman saw mills excavated at Ephesus respectively Gerasa.
The crank and connecting rod mechanism of these Roman watermills converted the rotary motion of the waterwheel into the linear movement of the saw blades. Sometime between 1174 and 1206, the Arab inventor and engineer Al-Jazari described a machine which incorporated the connecting rod with a crankshaft to pump water as part of a water-raising machine, but the device was unnecessarily complex indicating that he still did not fully understand the concept of power conversion. In Renaissance Italy, the earliest evidence of a ? albeit mechanically misunderstood ? compound crank and connecting-rod is found in the sketch books of Taccola. A sound understanding of the motion involved displays the painter Pisanello (d. 1455) who showed a piston-pump driven by a water-wheel and operated by two simple cranks and two connecting-rods. By the 16th century, evidence of cranks and connecting rods in the technological treatises and artwork of Renaissance Europe becomes abundant; Agostino Ramelli's The Diverse and Artifactitious Machines of 1588 alone depicts eighteen examples, a number which rises in the Theatrum Machinarum Novum by Georg Andreas Bockler to 45 different machines.