It's a comparator clock: subtraction mode with a repeater (to add a tick) pushing directly into it's side.
Comparator clocks are not fully off-on; they generate a 1-14 signal strength alternation. You need a 0-any.
Wait, holding a magnetized shaft in your inventory screws with the engine? If so, could I ask for a notation about that in the RotaryCraft handbook?
This (like the ideas of parallel multiplication, heat transfer, boiling point of water, and common sense) falls under "expected prerequisite knowledge". In this case, the fact that moving a magnetic field around a conductor generates a current.
I saw others with similar issues commenting on a wiki somewhere while I searched for this information. It worked fine when I tested to understand the engine, but then when I went to do testing on the speed of magnetization and demagnetization of multiple shafts with varying magnetization torques and speeds, things stopped working when I creative-pick-block-cloned a stack of partially magnetized shafts from what I had charged so far.
Check that you have both a good fast AC clock and magnetized cores.
90% of the people who use the AC engine fail to grasp this, and either use clocks that are absurdly slow (eg ExtraUtils), not fully AC (eg comparator), do not magnetize the core, or fail to give AC to the magnetizer.
Incidentally, this is not clear regarding the magnetization and demagnetization, and it's what I was experimenting to discover when I ran into troubles: Energy cost to magnetize is [greaterthan? equalto?] energy output of the resultant AC engine?
No. The magnetizer requires much less than the AC engine emits.
Between 1.5 and 1.6 FTB, I spent a long time playing GT and IC2 without other industrial mods, so I feel really awkward and cringe every time I have to use a pick on a machine that doesn't have a proper tool. Is there a wrench from another mod that works on your blocks?
To be clear: Any pick, but no other tools or magic drops the reservoir block and preserves contents, right? Or... are you saying the portable-tank-like behavior is unintended?
Pickaxes are the only tools that will work on my machines. IC2 Drills and TiC hammers have been excluded for realism reasons (especially the hammer). Pickaxes are included because they are the only method in vanilla to harvest iron-type blocks, and because I personally hate the IC2 mechanic of needing a wrench.
I would allow the "shift-right-click" mechanic with the BC or TE wrenches, but the RC screwdriver is registered as the same, and as such I would have to special-case the code everywhere (which is messy) to avoid breaking its own shift-right-click mechanic.
Whoops. 