Greg Rockwood sent me this link regarding the recent space elevator contest at Edwards AFB this week:
http://www.denverpost.com/nationworld/ci_13710120
He also observed that maybe we can run servo motors without wiring someday, using this power beaming technology. Hmmm - how about a tilting rotary table riding on a VTL. We could shoot a laser at it periodically to charge the servo/controller's supercap power supply.
Stay tuned.
Warren
Thursday, November 5, 2009
Wednesday, November 4, 2009
Early November Update
Well, here we are into November and I thought I'd mention a couple of things that our guys are doing.
-American Metal Bearing - The machine developed a bad noise in high range early this week as they were checking it out for production. Jeff had fine tuned the zero return and re-checked out the dual feedback late last week after the X ballscrew work was done by Chris and Bill, but the noisy spindle was a surprise to us. Bill went right down and discovered several problems inside the gearbox that were totally unrelated to anything we had done during the recent retrofit work. Parts should be in tomorrow and the machine could be back running with some new bearings and clutch parts early next week.
-GE Duarte - Basem did an excellent job of repairing two VCU's for them in a hurry this week. In addition, he went over and fixed some wiring problems caused by careless installation.
-Health Insurance - Nothing is ever easy. We've been through a few glitches in getting the plans switched over and hope that the Healthnet will be in place soon, probably with back coverage from November 1. I'll keep you updated.
-NOV (Varco) - Jeff, Jon, Travis, and I were all involved it the first of what we hope are many "Real Time" machine monitoring installations there. The first one we did was a horizontal G&L. It required some custom circuitry by Jon to detect motion in Z, but it is working well now. The system is by Refresh Your Memory, and has an excellent web interface (www.rym.com).
Thanks to all of you who have made sacrifices during these tough times.
Warren
-
-American Metal Bearing - The machine developed a bad noise in high range early this week as they were checking it out for production. Jeff had fine tuned the zero return and re-checked out the dual feedback late last week after the X ballscrew work was done by Chris and Bill, but the noisy spindle was a surprise to us. Bill went right down and discovered several problems inside the gearbox that were totally unrelated to anything we had done during the recent retrofit work. Parts should be in tomorrow and the machine could be back running with some new bearings and clutch parts early next week.
-GE Duarte - Basem did an excellent job of repairing two VCU's for them in a hurry this week. In addition, he went over and fixed some wiring problems caused by careless installation.
-Health Insurance - Nothing is ever easy. We've been through a few glitches in getting the plans switched over and hope that the Healthnet will be in place soon, probably with back coverage from November 1. I'll keep you updated.
-NOV (Varco) - Jeff, Jon, Travis, and I were all involved it the first of what we hope are many "Real Time" machine monitoring installations there. The first one we did was a horizontal G&L. It required some custom circuitry by Jon to detect motion in Z, but it is working well now. The system is by Refresh Your Memory, and has an excellent web interface (www.rym.com).
Thanks to all of you who have made sacrifices during these tough times.
Warren
-
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)