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Armadillo Aerospace News: More miscellaneous
We were a little bit light this week, because I had E3 business, and Russ and Phil’s company had their respective industry trade show, but we still got a lot done.
Joseph is all ready to pour concrete for our peroxide storage building.
We got in the rolled and welded cones for three small crush cones and two large ones, so we did all the hole marking and drilling. We are not adding vent holes on the small cones, because there is still 4x the volume in uncrushable cone and coupler underneath it, so overpressure shouldn’t be an issue.
We got in the conical flanges that will be permanently mounted to the tanks, allowing us to unbolt the entire cabin section for work or swapping to another tank. Unfortunately, they aren’t quite long enough. The were 7” long, but at a 10 degree angle, the 1/8” thickness and manufacturing tolerances caused the cabin to sit about 3” higher than expected. We could just barely have made it work, but I decided to get new flange hoops made that are 11” long. The annoying thing is that I should have realized that there was no downside to making them taller in the first place (except a little weight) – I was worried about it interfering with the hatch reinforcement plate, but that sits on the outside of the cone, so it wouldn’t have mattered. Read More

posted by Sigurd @ 5/17/2003 03:50:00 AM