Why You Keep Seeing These Strange Oval Axles
You might think something's broken when you first spot those strange oval axles in an old motor or a piece of heavy machinery, but they're actually there for a very specific reason. Most of us are used to the idea that anything that spins should be perfectly round. Wheels, gears, ball bearings—the whole point of the industrial revolution was basically making things more circular, right? So, when you pull a cover off a machine and see an axle that looks like it's been squashed in a vice, it's a bit of a head-scratcher. ...