Back on track

I’d been having problems getting the flywheel mass symmetric. The dominant flaw was uneven thickness around the rim, so by griding the front face, and spending a little time tweaking the cap screws on the hub, I have a satisfactory result:

Thanks again to Grant for giving up some of his time up to show me how to work another machine in the ‘shop.

It must be time for a beer.

one step forward, two steps back

Various tries at machining a flywheel and hub have failed to produce a concentric and even distribution of mass. The problem is having to flip the part in the lathe, and machining a separate hub.

I’m going to attempt machining the hub on the CNC. If that fails to solve the problem, I’ll attempt to machine the entire flywheel…not sure how to fit the grub screw if I do that, but I’ll figure something out!

Here’s what it looks like so far:

 

Nearly ready for testing…

The new flywheel drive motor arrived which should provide a little over 1 kgcm stall torque at 12 V without the motor controller faulting out. Its 5 pole armature should deliver this to a slow rotating load with reasonable efficiency. To do: flywheel.

In the photo you can see a training wheel hot-glued to the base wheel drive motor, installed so I can spend some time tuning the base drive inverted pendulum without having to worry about the lateral balancing. Maybe more obvious in the photo is the upside-down bucket, or “stupidity protection device”, installed to prevent damage to the flywheel drive shaft during the tuning phase. I’ll have to come up with something better as I progress, because it’s looking a bit like a Dalek at the mo.