Maximum Theoretical Power from Unbalanced Wheel

[Flyboy]

I am trying to wrap my head around the unbalanced wheel.  I made a very fast sketch in paint to illustrate it in the extreme, where the one weight follows the circumference of the wheel as it descends, and follows the vertical axis on its way up.

Questions:
1. Does this path create the maximum off balance (highest power output)?  If not what is the theoretical Ideal path for the weight to follow.
2.is it still in balance? The weight on the way down is has less downward force because it is following an incline except for a brief moment when it reaches the height of the axial while the full downward force is in effect on the upward travelling weight.

If you have more questions please add them and hopefully some of you guru's who have thought this through will be able to shed some light on this.

Thanks in advance everyone for your contributions

[Flyboy]

Reserved for future use (will consolidate information from discussion here)

[Thaelin]

   The amount of power delivered to the rotational shaft center depends on how much weight and how far from center it is. The more the value, the more the output.

thaelin

[Cloxxki]

In that case...
Imagine a lifting tower as sketched, and a very slightly sloping plain right to it.
Once way out, the weight transfers onto a lever coming from the base of the tower.
The tower could be central and the plain circular, directing each next weight to another lever, organised like a sunflower around it.

If indeed the long lever makes a difference, there should be sufficient energy stored, in a wind-up kind of engine (toy car engine for proto) to bring the weights up.
A very slow sytem, but it could have a high through-put.

I am sceptical though about this. A longer lever can deliver more focused pressure I would say, not do more work for a given weight and height overcome. This has been tried so often, there have to be better ways.

[Flyboy]

Thanks guys for the replies.

Lets take the example picture (...E1) it consists of a wheel with teeth (blue dots) for a chain (green) to run on (think bicycle chain).  The two black circles are sprockets which at the top help lift the chain over the teeth and allow the chain to seat back on the wheel, while the bottom sprocket pops the chain off the wheel.

(For the sake of simplicity lets assume a frictionless system)  Now as I analyze the system I find that the gravity pulling the chain down is balanced.  Even though more links of chain are on the downward travelling side, the force is diluted by the 'slope' as the chain follows the circumference of the wheel.  Thus we can expect the chain to effortlessly spin as the force needed to raise the chain is exactly equal to the force created by gravity pulling down on the chain (no surprises here).

The magic comes into play when we look at the balance of the wheel and see that it has more weight on the the right than the left.  This should cause the wheel to twist clockwise (see ...E2).

The problem is I am fairly confident that this has been tried many times as it would be such a simple build... I can't begin to understand what makes it not work (or does it?).  Can someone please explain why this has not worked for others.