Saturday, August 15, 2009

Another Long Day.

The Day Started at 5:30 I spent the first hour planning my weekend. the next hour I laid out the parts and peices for the days and figured out what I was missing. Then I was at Marshals Industrial hardware store at 8:am and the IMS Metal supply at 8:30.
... Its 10:30 PM I'm done for the day.

I Fabricated two beefy bearing holders and gearbox adapters for to the ball screws that will be the gimbal actuators on the silver beast. I also machined the ball screw ends and made a planetary spider to ball screw adapter. Its going to be a light, strong, fast and brush less gimbal actuator.
They are about 1/2 the weight and cost of the bug actuators everyone else is using. (assuming my time is worth zero, any realistic valuation of time and there insanely expensive.)

I also spent about 4 hours at Flometrics testing injector concepts for the Bi-prop and Steve an I built a flow visulization test setup. Many thanks to Steve! We used Flometrics Pistonless Rocket Pump as the drive the injectors, we could dial up any pressure from 50 to 400PSI and it just worked. It was flawless. Some of the misting spray nozzles have a maximum pressure, we discovered that one of the tested spray heads had unstable flow above its rated pressure. It was a swirl nozzle and it had cavitaion where the flow was really erattic. That was about the only real supprise everything else tested as one would expect it to.

I'll post some pictures of the tests. Sunday I hope to turn what I learned from the testing into a set of drawings to Fabricate the injector. I also ope to compeltly finish my actuators.
It was nive to spend the weekend making stuff rather than driving out to the desert/FAR.

3 comments:

Stevo Harrington said...

For the nozzle with brass parts, you might want to use a water purge after the burn to prevent the brass from melting during the startup or shutdown process
Steve
Flometrics (no" w")

Paul Breed said...

Sorry about the W its fixed. (The other Flometrics reference was correct)

David said...

Sounds like a fascinating process doing the testing. I am looking forward to the pictures and additional commentary.