This week I started to work on the float again. At this point it was a lot more waiting for prints to finish, then testing them, then reprinting a new version. This meant that I had lots of downtime in the shop. With this time I did a little project for Mr. Christy.

Mr. Christy is building a herb press that uses an 8 inch C clamp and a steel cup. This is all going to be welded to a steel baseplate. The problem occured when he needed to figure out how thick the baseplate needed to be to withstand the preasure. This was a fairly simple setup, just a static stress simulation, but required many solves, and geometry changes. We started by trying to find how much preasure one of the C clamps could exert, which turned out to be around 60000 newtons on the low end. I quickly realized that the baseplate would be the weakpoint unless we wanted to do some crazy thickness like 3/4". I started by finding the point at which it permanantly deforms and judged the different designs off of that. The design that we landed on was a 1/4" plate with two stiffening rods down the sides, which added over 1000 newtons to the force required to permanantly deform it.

Image of the simgulation
This is the winning desing out of the 1/4 inch variations. I used the max psi to determine if the steel permanatly deforms or not.
Image of the simgulation
This was the first version that I tested. As you can see it is very bent, and well past steels deformation preasure.

Today Mr. Christy found the peice of metal that he is going to use. It is a 3/8ths plate, so it will be stiffer. This added about 2500 newtons to the amount of force it can withstand.

Image of the new simgulation
Here is the new stress analysis results.

The float is coming along well. I am pretty close to a good design for the O-ring geometry which I have been working on and off on for about 2 months now.

Image of o-oring test prints
These are the prints that I use to test the orings. They are printed on our Form 3 resin printers.