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Armadillo Aerospace News: Better liftoff, Jet vane vehicle
After missing both the originally quoted and later verbal ship dates, the thermocouple amplifiers from Axiomatic finally arrived, and, wait for it… they were the wrong supply voltage. I wasn’t about to wait for them to correct it, so I looked around until I found another supplier. http://www.piresearch.com/ had just what I wanted, and they fed-exed three two me the next day, and said they could get more from the UK by Friday. On Friday they called and said that they had been hung up in customs longer than expected, but they could ship it Saturday delivery if I wanted. Quite a difference in service. The Axiomatic parts went back for a refund. The Pi parts are intended for auto racing exhaust temperature measurement, so they don’t include a precise calibration, but they are doing the job.
We built some metal stands that the vehicle could rest on during warmup and before liftoff, then have them just fall over so the vehicle would have free-swinging space under the crane, but it kept falling off of them during the warmup pulses when it lightened up a little. I would really like to get this working so the vehicle doesn’t have to start out rotating and tipping, and I can give everything a really good warmup, but we may need to make them a bit more self supporting, and actually pull them out from under the vehicle on liftoff, but that is potentially error prone. Read More

posted by Sigurd @ 4/19/2004 01:01:00 PM