I don’t see why this wouldn’t be possible? It seems pretty straightforward to me; the only hard part would be the thing that seems hard about making any hourglass, which is getting it to take the right amount of time, but that’s a problem hourglass manufacturers have already solved. It’s just a valve that doesn’t close all the way:
Unless you meant, “how can I make such an hourglass myself, out of things I have at home?” in which case, idk bro.
One question I have about both your solution and mine is how easy it is to vary the time drastically by changing the size of the hole. My intuition says that too large holes behave much differently than smaller holes and if you want a drastic 5x difference in speed you might get into this “too large and the sand sort of just rushes through” behavior.
I don’t see why this wouldn’t be possible? It seems pretty straightforward to me; the only hard part would be the thing that seems hard about making any hourglass, which is getting it to take the right amount of time, but that’s a problem hourglass manufacturers have already solved. It’s just a valve that doesn’t close all the way:
Unless you meant, “how can I make such an hourglass myself, out of things I have at home?” in which case, idk bro.
One question I have about both your solution and mine is how easy it is to vary the time drastically by changing the size of the hole. My intuition says that too large holes behave much differently than smaller holes and if you want a drastic 5x difference in speed you might get into this “too large and the sand sort of just rushes through” behavior.