This week the shop flooded. With all of the weather we have been having, a drain outside clogged, and a bunch of water came in through the garage door. This basically killed all productivity for wednesday, but the week wasn’t too bad. This week I did the first test of the piston action inside the tube, which was fairly sucessful, with some minor hiccups.

This week was all about getting the piston to be tested, which meant attaching the nut, and nutplate. The nutplate was acrylic welded into place in the tube, and the nut simply JB welded into place, where the geometry is advantageous.

Our float works off of vacuum, so one stroke is very hard, but the return stroke is assisted by both water preasure, and air preasure inside, this creates a senario, where the flanged lead screw nut can be oriented in a correct way, and an incorrect way. If we put the nut so that the flange is on the piston side of the nut plate, then the flange will be mechanically holding onto the plate, whereas in the other orientation, it would be only holding on with the JB weld. This creates a much stronger and more reliable mechanical system, that we have proven to work pretty well. We are not worried about the return stroke, as it is aided by so many preasures.

During the sucessful first test of the piston action, I found that the piston does infact need the anti-rotation rods that I worked on at the beginning of the year. I wanted to double check this, just because of how expensive these parts were. This out of the way we ordered the rods and the bushings for this.