So we're off on a voyage of discovery into how to make something cheaper. The first thing to go is the plethora of adjusters. I'd envisaged lots of precision drilled barrels which would give consistence between units. Of course if you take a cylindrical component that can be turned out a huge rate and then have to carefully mount them in a dividing head and drill 16 holes (8 for the indexing mechanism and 8 different sized ones for the orifices) in exact positions, then it's going to cost a lot more to build one. If you're building thousands then you sort out jigs and fixtures, but I can never foresee this being a mass production item, not matter how bling it is...
Now, I still want separate adjustability of high and low speed damping at a sane price, so that I can take a unit off the shelf and valve it for most applications. If we can't have miniature drilled orifices to squeeze hydraulic fluid through, then we'll need a needle valve that you can screw in and out to change the size of the orifice. Not as repeatable and you'll need a damper dynamometer (a few thousand pounds) to do setup.
High speed adjustment will be similar to the original design... OK, so a short CAD session later we have mark II of the adjustment valving:
I've shrunk the component count down from eight individual bits down to three (not including the coil spring and various sealing O-rings) and there's no nasty indexing and drilling required. With the exception of an exhaust hole in the blue component and the hex adjuster on the top, it's all lathe manufacture and thus reasonably rapid (and hopefully cheap)
Away from the tiny precision bits, I'm rationalising the design of the main body. Instead of having a massive boring job, I'll use standard off the shelf tubes interfacing with turned caps. Minimal cost, and bar a few threads, no machining. It'll all be fine...
No comments:
Post a Comment