Halfway there...

There... that looks a little prettier than the original 'let's take a big hunk of billet and turn most of it into swarf' valve block. All it needs is a pair of pipes to connect it to the cylinder and we'll have a working damper. I've change the design slightly in that instead of using a hex and a slot to do the adjustment, we just have nicely knurled knobs..

As in all these things, the devil is in the details and I've just spent a useful hour best part of a morning making sure these things can actually be built and put together. There's nothing quite like realising that your O-rings will never seal because the bore is too large or you can't actually insert the springs and valve seat into the canister because the hole is too small. For those without a copy of thread tables and the like to hand, I can thoroughly recommend the RoyMech website (http://www.roymech.co.uk) as somewhere to find all those useful little diagrams and measurements.

Anyway, just got the last parts of the other half to sort and then the tedious job of creating engineering drawings for manufacture.