Sunday, November 12, 2006

A weekends work.

I worked on this all weekend and I've machined the parts for 4 valves. I've fully assembled one and done some preliminary testing, so far it looks good. I promissed some pictures. The first picture on the is the Ryobi drill taken apart.





The next picture is the set of machined parts nevessary to turn this into a valve driver. The part on the left consists of a custom piece bolted to the remanats of the drill chuck that was turned down.



The next picture is an assembled valve.


The motor power wires are on the left, the small wires exiting the top go to the magnetic position sensor that sense a small magnet glued to the top of valve shaft. I've built for of these. When I get the electronics to operate them done I'll test one with LN2 and see how they work.

The finished valve weight about 1100 grams.
The machined parts are about 170 gm and the just the motor without any thing else is 350.
so there is some room to use a better (brushless ) motor and trim some weight.
The final valve could probably end up under 1Kg.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hello! I'm just catching up with your blog from a link at AA.

How much does an actual aerospace valve weigh? You mentioned that real valves are expensive and heavy. I'm sure that your valve is a lot less expensive, but how much lighter?

Anonymous said...

Sorry for the double-post, but I had another thought. Why the right-angle drill? Why not just have the motor come straight up away from the valve? It seems like it would be even lighter, and with less room for failure...

I'm sure you're way to busy actually doing these things to actually reply much, but maybe someone else who strolls by will know the answer?