Monday, March 8, 2010

Snap, Crackle, Pop

Soon after fixing the shear pin, we blew up the most highly loaded of the ratchet hubs. The ratchet head itself was fine, it tore out of the housing that I machined.

Several good things here:

A: No damage other than to the hub itself
B: It's easy for me to machine another more substantive hub
C: The propeller was already absorbing almost 2x the design HP before this happened.

All in all an easy fix and under field conditions we don't expect to ever load the system this high again.