🗑️ 🧵 Brainlet can't into simple math

Anonymous at Wed, 26 Jun 2024 12:26:52 UTC No. 16254639

Hi, /sci/, I'm doing a simple mechanical project and I I'm wondering if you'd help me understand what exactly am I doing wrong. I wanted to calculate some forces, until I got fucking filtered by pic rel.
There's a wedge(or slope?) with an angle alpha and weight force Q, and a sheet of metal (which rounded edge I substituted with circle here) pushed horizontally with force F . Wedge can only move vertically freely (it's only degree of freedom) and circle can only move horizontally analogically to the wedge (shown in gray on the drawing).
I wanted to solve for F to see what force should I use to keep wedge from sliding down, but anything I came up with I compared with solutions from equations where alpha ranged from 0 to pi/2 and it always turned out that for angles after pi/3 force started decreasing. Intuition tells, that the wider the angle the stronger force we would need to keep the wedge from falling, which renders my previous attempts incorrect.
So what is the correct solution? It drives me mad that I can't find the solution despite problem being so easy. Sorry if I didn't make everything clear enough. I've never actually described anything physics-related in english despite hearing it quite often.
Tl;dr: Solve for F needed to keep slope from falling