As I mentioned in my last post several design modifications were required. Starting with the actuators, these had been checked in CAD and the lengths required were 60mm. In reality this stroke length worked as designed but we never allowed for any slop in the system. The stroke needed to be extended by 5mm so the mechanism could lock. This applied to the rear rams and the forward ram. I also wanted to use a larger diameter ram on the rear actuation as the pressures involved with the 25mm ram currently installed were increasing up to 10bar to get a smooth retraction. We can get a similar level of force at 6bar with a 32mm diameter ram. Changing the rams required a redesign of the mountings. There is a lot of force going through these so we used a 6mm carbon former to mount 4 CNC’d brackets which secure the rams. A ‘U’ shaped 6mm carbon former was installed to transmit the load into the fuselage via the forward spar box. Below shows the new mountings although I still haven’t bonded it all to the side of the fuselage yet.
<script async src="//embedr.flickr.com/assets/client-code.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
<script async src="//embedr.flickr.com/assets/client-code.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
The actuation for the front has been tweaked and now uses 6mm carbon. The front ram works both skis. If there is a failure we want it to be symmetrical this is particularly important at the front.
<script async src="//embedr.flickr.com/assets/client-code.
js" charset="utf-8"></script>
This hopefully solves the issues internally, we now need to address the problems in the external mechanism and main pivots.