Had a bunch of stuff going on the last year, nothing to say about it. But now, I’m finally back in the garage, and especially down in the machine shop. One project for this year will be an inverted pendulum – I’m doing an internship at the Australian Synchrotron, which is interesting, but has less math and theory than I was expecting, and I’m in danger of getting rusty. So I figure I can design and build a reaction wheel inverted pendulum – a single DOF version of this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=woCdjbsjbPg
So, finally, got the mill running, and made some aluminium chips:
Somewhere inside all that is a slide plate that will have a motor mounted to it:
The fit is pretty good:
It’ll end up a bit like this, but with a big spinning motor on it:
I had the same discovery that I keep making in the machine shop – everything can run faster 🙂 Both steel and aluminium now, I’ve made some cuts, they seemed a bit painful, I did more research and discovered I should be running the cutter about twice as fast. Then it gets a lot less painful 🙂 So I’ll bear that in mind when I make the actual reaction wheel …
In the background, I’ve been cleaning up an old dial gauge:
It hasn’t been treated well, and it’s a bit sticky. The internet (actually, Tom Lipton of OxToolCo) recommends light fluid for cleaning it up:
Initial results are promising – it gets a bit sticky again the next day, but it’s getting there – snaps back better now than it did.