We have side housings eagerly awaiting the results of your tests!

 

Hell I dumber than a box of rocks.... just ask Ms. Scalli! But thanks for the undeserving compliment anyways

 

Yep, I know that is right My earliest offer will still stand (about 40 pages back ) That is that I still need people that are ready to build and will to take a risk. The case now will be though that since I am not setup to grind the side plates they would have to pay for those costs.
I will probably be keeping that offer local though and only to people I know don't procrastinate... that last part really narrows the field though. There must be some weird **** in the water down here though because most of these guys drag there asses. I'm twice there age and get over twice as much done
That is not so much a credit to me as an indictment to them believe me

Brian Cain is a good friend and he is always building motors. Mainly for other people. So I will probably talk to him about getting his customers to agree to doing their sides as long as these are people we can monitor.
I would like to have at least 6 motors testing. At least 2 of those being race cars. Depending on the timing of things I could get Ken Scheepers to run a batch. It would have to be well before race season though.

Hopefully the guy with the grinding shop will be easy on the pricing for the sides. He said he would but what he means by a good price and what I hope is a good price could be a long ways apart We will see.

But it goes without saying that anyone wanting sprayed housings and sides soon should definately go through Marc.
I would love for someone running their stuff to chime in on this thread. From what I read and seen I have no problem believing their claims. The bang for the buck is definately there. For people that have had failures and lost practically new housings should contact them to do their actual housings. It beats the hell out of buying a new set and the fact there is no guarantee they will not have another failure.
Whether I succeed at this or not is yet to be determined but at some point getting a new set of certain housings will not be an option and neither will obtaining decent used sets for a reasonable price.
For right now they are the only source for a viable option in the future. It may be awhile but it is a certainty that those of us who wish to continue enjoying these current rotaries will be requiring these services one day.

 

I am really interested in side housing coating! My motor is an early opening port that drops the top sideseal into the port. I scissored, smoothed and burnished the top of the port, but I think a good coating sprayed on the housing and port would really help the sideseals out. I have been told most of the sideseal wear is from low rpms as they "float" more at high rpms. Sounds like perfect candidate for a low friction coating.

Let me know if you can extend the offer to us young *** draggers...

 

Scalli, I am sure you have already thought of it, but why not just run the setup in an enclosed environment?
Pull a vacuum and cycle argon through the gun and the enclosed box. A pain in the *** I am sure, but it would help everywhere including the spray media, as I am sure at that temp it is probably reactive and pics up contaminates.

 

That is a great idea. But right now I am wanting to basically sell the idea off to Hewy as a alternative to the twin wire system. The twin wire arc spray (TWAS) can be ran in normal shop environments. You may remember that it was Hewy that told me about GM trying to get something to work and the others working on it. Well Hewy wants this.

The idea you have there I will probably shoot for at some point especially since I will be spraying the same things over and over. It would be easier to control and once you have all the adjustments set you have it made.
There are a few more tweaks I need to make on the gun but I hit a big pain in the *** problem tonight; my compressor that I just rebuilt is going south and I am not sure why. It is only getting to 80lbs and it is not hitting that very fast.
So now I can't get enogh air though my gun. One neat thing was that even though it sputtered out some blobs it did not roast down the tungsten.

One absolutely bad *** thing I figured out was how to tune the amperage and wire speed pretty close before running it. I can pull the handle from the spray head and run it against a piece of plate steel and adjust it. Just like MIG welding.
What is so cool about that is because it is really hard to get it right when it is way off and already setup to spray. Talk about a helluva selling point.
That along with the compact size and the fact that with a fairly average MIG setup and a decent air compressor ( ) it would not cost a small fortune to set a spray system up. This I do know
As long as they can run a 1/16" wire and up between the 200 and 300 amp range you could do this.
I made another video that I have to review when I get home to see if it is worth posting.

 

If I didn't know any better I'd think Scalli has just contradicted himself big time. From saying that he is just tinkering around with this machinery, and isn't that great at it, to possbily selling a design for a new wire spray gun that he has developed? Seems like your capabilites and ideas are better than you give yourself credit for, if people from the industry are extremely interested in what you are developing. Keep up the good work buddy. Maybe with a demonstration you can convince one of those guys to let you borrow a new air compressor to do further testing with. Of course this is probably just me in my dream world. Good luck.

- Steiner

 

get me a quote on that grinding man and I'll drive up and help spray them and put them on a test log


I use vaccum cylinders to suck air outta silicon molds I pour for metal casting, once I built a box with window, hooked it up to vaccum pump, figuring it going to work, turned it on and went for lunch, 30 mins later(typical for around 30", vaccuming takes a while) it was sucked to 27psi, crumpled the poor thing
I looked at it and went duh shoulda used a cylinder capped off on both sides. no problems since then

also thought about it for welding, but even at 30" I still think there is too much oxygen to contaminate, let me investigate. Then there's problem about how to seal my gloves with out them inflating like crazy into the chamber. I figured using some rubber gloves for sealing with leather welding gloves over them(glued possibly) to prevent balloning from pressure differences
anyways now im ranting

 

The vacuum is just to get rid of the nitrogen and oxygen (reactants), once it is gone you can repressurize the vessel with argon up to 1 ATM and the glove/access issue will not be a problem.

You could potentially do this with your welding as well. (I believe they do something similar for titanium and other very reactant materials at high temperatures.)

 

yea Titanium is welded like you said, the problem with that system is that after your done, how to reclaim your precious costly inert gas of choice?

I mean figure I dunno a couple cubic meters of space to be inert. thats quite a bit of gas.

hell just get a box and run your exhaust into it, **** that's how I weld on full gas tanks...

 

Haha! I didn't contradict myself. I've said it before and I'll say it again that even dumbasses get lucky sometimes
And as far as you in your "dream world" is concerned remember the wisdom of another notable "Steiner"... "Imagination is more important than knowledge" - Albert EinStein(er) So dream on....

As far as the compressor it really sucks because that set me back. I need to pull the head back off and this time I need to pop the pistons and replace the rings.
Not that the weekend is back upon me again I have to fill parts orders.
For some weird *** reason over 50% of the orders this week were engine stand adaptors They are pretty easy to knock out though. The two bead rollers suck to make though
But I will make time to at least get the compressor back apart.

 

You are definately close enough to help test That casting you are doing has so much potential. I have never attempted any type of casting. But you get good at it and I can damn sure send some work your way.

 

This is what I would try, couldn’t you just recycle the gas using the vac pump to store in a different vessel, pull a vac again after removing finished parts and put the argon back in the work tank? Even with a small amount of contamination it would still reduce the amount of impurities significantly.

Obviously it would take a lot to warrant that kind of system, but it could be done fairly easily I would think.

If you could just blow exhaust into it, it would be real simple, just build a box that is transparent in the front with long glove access to spray the parts in with a small highpoint exhaust hole with a spring loaded flapper door on the top (argon is heavier than air so the air will tend to be at the top of the box ). And just exhaust a small amount into the box as the process is going would probably be sufficient to help significantly.

But he needs to have a constant flow of compressed argon to eject the hot media, plus if I remember correctly the emmisivity of argon is very low so the media will stay a little warmer as it is bonding to the surface.


Scalliwag, did your distributor relay any information about the spraying techniques involved with this wire? Is it even a problem to keep it shielded? What are its base components?

 

I would think you could use a freon recovery system and both retrieve and push it into the vessel. There are two recovery systems at one of the scrapyards I go to. I guess I will snag them next time out.

As far as the distributor giving the spray techniques; under normal circumstances there would be no shielding gas. Since the twin wire system has two wires (one positive/ one negative) there is not a electrode to protect and the alloys are not negatively affected by air.
If I did use a vacuum method it would re-pressurize as I metallized because I do have to force some type of gas under pressure through the nozzle. So some sort of pump that circulated the gas from the vessel and delivered it with enough force would be critical.
A chiller could probably be implemented as well.

 

Here is the newest video. Even though I have to let up on it you can tell the spray is much more intense than before. Arghhhh...... my kingdom for a compressor

http://www.scalliwag.com/singlearc/singwire2.wmv

 

scalli how much is the compressor you need? I would be willing to donate much in the form of a grant, not a lot because I am poor, but others could to. I mean we would be helping ourselves in the end seeing as how we would be reaping the benefits. Give me a PayPal address and I will send a couple bucks your way, get some of the other forum members to do the same and you could get that compressor :P

--Fritz

 

- Steiner

 

Wow, I really appreciate the offer but I am okay on the money side of things. It is the time thing that is kicking my ***. Working fulltime and making stuff to pay the shop bills is pretty time intensive.
A project of this type demands a lot of time as well. I am my own worst enemy when it comes to these types of things as well. I should probably send the compressor to a compressor shop and get it fixed but I just can't bring myself to pay for something I can do myself.
Once we get to the point at the shop where we have a large enough workload to hire someone to handle filling orders I will actually have more time to do the fun stuff

Once again the offer is appreciated but hang on to your money or pick up something for your favorite gal. This will all work itself out in time.

 

Hey Steiner your pic in your sig is missing the close bracket ]

 

OK scalli I was pretty bored tonight so I decided to think about a gun setup which may improve your spray pattern. However I am not sure how feasible it really is to make. One thing I see about your prototype gun is that the nozzle is round. I think this may cause a somewhat inconsistant spray pattern because most of your material is going to be spraying out of the center as opposed to being evenly distributed across one line of spray. As I'm sure you know paintguns use nozzles wth a straight slit to create a line of spray. Now secondly It seems that the tunsten is overheating so I played around with some ideas for efficient cooling passages. This is just an idea so feel free to laugh and redicule it. ;o)

I think another point of consideration is your spray distance. If there's anyway to get this thing within about an inch and a half I think some of your problems with the Argon may be nulled out. Does Aramacor by cance have a smaller gauge wire available? Maybe a smaller wire would allow you to turn the voltage down and run a little cooler with a finer spray pattern?

One thing I've learned is to always keep it simple. I think the fundamental elements could be scrutinized more before building a gas chamber.

Note that my ghetto paint drawings are not to scale and the converging gas chamber angles are exagerated


Drawing 1: looking head on at the back half of the gun (minus nozzle) The yellow represents the argon before it converges on the wire spray.

Drawing 2: Side view. Notice that the argon sandwiches the flat pattern of the coating spray to keep out nastiness and keep the spray in a straight pattern.
the tungsten actually makes contact with the coolant channel in one section and 4 tunnels of cycling coolant surround the tungsten near the chamber.

 

Yeah yeah I know. They tell me my sig is to large again, so I need to resize, and have been to enthralled in reading tonight to take a chance to change it. I'll take care of it in the morning before I hit the dungeon.

- Steiner

 

Gongrats on what have accomplished so-far Scalli, We all realize that you have forked out a lot of cheese for this already so we want to do what we can to help, and learn from you along the way.

keep truckin, Rob

 

As far as the spray pattern goes I went with the round nozzle because of what I have seen in videos, mainly this video http://www.liquidmetal.com/media/Coatings.wmv You will see a gun spraying at the beginning and then another at around the 2 minute 30 second mark.
At some point I am very sure I will tweak around with nozzles and see what works best. Especially since I need to make this work as close as possible.

On the wire size, 1/16" is the only size available in this wire. Armacor ran a special batch of .045" for GM. Hewy indicated that run cost a small fortune. He said it is harder to make. We had that conversation 2 years ago and from what I remember they have a higher waste rate when they made it. So it was out of the question unless GM ordered more and he ran me some during a run.
Hewy has not heard from them since the first run so either they did not succeed or else they made a different process. They may be using a powder with plasma or HVOF. I am almost certain Marc's company is using one of those processes.

But I feel I can work around this wire. I do think I have had a huge amount of sheer luck at this point. Probably most of my design is so far off the beaten path of logical design that it has not been tried.
Everyone including Hewy had pushed to have the wire come from the back. I knew that would cause the gun to be longer. But I knew I could change it if I had to. Since I went into this so blindly not having any clue as what to expect I shot for the most compact shape to start with. Then Hans threw out the twin electrode idea and now we are seeing sparks

 

I see what you are saying about the video. I'm sure that you will be able to make the wire work or we wouldn't be on page 47 of this thread.
So what would you say is the biggest hurdle right now aside from the compressor?

 

I have a gut feeling that after the compressor is ready that I will have to find the true balance on tuning the gun. Hewy told me that the finer the spray the better. So that is what I am working for. The way I have the argon and compressed air coming in may have to be tweaked.
But the only hurdle left is the tuning once the compressor is up. Once I can get a decent spray and where I can run a long time with a steady consistant spray is when I will get Hewy up. It is in my best interest to have it running as good as possible before he comes.