OK, a few more pics this week. I have done a bit more on the tube saddles and made some progress on the secondary spider / hub support. The design for the latter will be based on the offset vanes outlined in Texereau's book as well as a few ideas of my own.
The images are as follows:
- I have drilled, tapped and glued in the threaded stainless inserts (used to attach the saddles to the versa-plate) and cut the slots in the saddle ends. I have also sourced the stainless straps from a local supplier. You can also see a length of 12mm stainless rod that I will cut up and thread and pin to the straps, as well as some of the bronze retainers that will provide a method of tensioning the strap to the saddles.
- I used some 25mm wooden handle to wrap dozens of layers of fibreglass & carbon cloth to form a cylinder, which will be cut at 90/45 degrees to be used as the spider hub. Here you can see the start of cutting using an old GMC compund saw.
- Initial cutting completed - you can see the final part sitting on the saw platform, as well as leftover parts of the layup.
- Here you can see the spider hub cleaned up with the wood dowel removed, next to the leftover section. If I muck it up I can use the leftover section to make another one
- Here you can see some of the components that will be used to fabricate the spider assembly:
- the 45 degree hub
- 2 elliptical carbon fibre plates that I made (approx 6.7mm thick each). M2 will be attached to one by three dobs of silicone at the appropriate positions, and the other plate will be glued to the 45degree section of the spider hub with stainless threaded inserts to attach to an aluminium collar.
- 32.8mm titanium tube that will be used as the central rotation / translation axis of the assembly. It has an aluminium collar that I will shrink fit on one end that will be used to attach to the 45 degree hub. Note that this particular collar won't be used as I made a couple of mistakes (one was that I bored it out too much which ruined the shrink fit).
- the micro-collimator (on the titanium tube) that I made from carbon fibre / epoxy resin that will be used to provide rotational adjustment (note the 2 push screws with black thumb knobs) as well as positional control (up/down the tube).
- Not shown yet are the stainless steel vanes, 2 aluminium ends that will fit over the titanium tube (like the micro-collimator) and some 8mm titanium rod that will provide anchors for the vanes.