On the counterweights of clocks
How much weight replaces lost motion, and advice to instrument-makers on oil and dust
The central treatise, headed "On the counterweights of clocks," argues that if a clock's counterweight descends 100 braccia while unwinding 100 braccia of cord, and you want the same work done in a single braccio of descent, you must add as much weight as motion is lost, that is 99 libbre to a weight that was first one. Leonardo marvels at nature's fixed law and warns the instrument-maker that in a train of wheels the least obstruction, or oil thickened by dust, ruins the clock. Lower diagrams pose further mechanical problems: from which point a load is dragged most easily, why an oblique pull is easier than a straight one, and how a blow's force falls to a sixteenth when the struck body is divided.
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On the counterweights of clocks
If a clock's counterweight descends 100 braccia and unwinds 100 braccia of cord, and you wish those 100 braccia unwound by a single braccio of the counterweight's motion, you must add as much weight as it lacks in motion. Where one libbra first sufficed, adding 99 libbre restores the same force, weight and motion, because the single line of cord becomes 99 shorter lines, one libbra to each.
Warning to the instrument-maker: oil, dust and the wheel-train
Leonardo reminds the composer of instruments that when many wheels drive one another from a first counterweight, as in clocks, the least opposing thing lengthens the hours, and a little oil repairs it. But when the oil fails or thickens with dust the clock is soon ruined, for every least thing in the last wheels spoils the ease of the first motion.
Oblique pull is easier than straight (f m versus f n)
Beside a figure lettered f, n, m, Leonardo states that a man will certainly pull more easily obliquely, along f m, than straight, along f n. A companion figure lettered a, b, c, d asks from which point a load is dragged most easily.
A blow diminishing from 4 to a sixteenth
Against a scale numbered 4, 2, 1, 1/2, 1/4, 1/8, 1/16, he notes that the blow diminishes from 4 libbre down to a sixteenth because the struck thing is divided.
