Aquaponics - Pump rebuild ver 2.0

Only 26 hours after showing off my pump rebuild version 1.0 to international aquaponics legend TCLynx, my pump started screeching, then ground to a halt.

It used to look like this.













The two bits of wire coming from opposing sides support the shaft because...

1. It's a shaft from a different pump and doesn't fit

2. Because it was a loose fit, it wobbled around all over the shop and caused a great deal of wear.

So you could describe my pump as "having seen better days".

A lot better days, and a lot of better days.

Its been running for years in an aquarium, then spent a few years in a shed, then got re-deployed into my aquaponics system.

Soon after It's re-deployment, I had to buy a new impeller. The impeller is the bit that spins around and shifts the water.

A few weeks after that I had a look at it and found a lot of wear on the front bearing.

That's why I originally put the wire in place to hold the shaft from wobbling.

So as a result of all the screeching and grinding to a halt, I pulled it apart and found what may well be the thing causing all the problems. 

It's possible the shaft is no longer within original design specs due to what may be some wear.

Interestingly, there is no sign of wear on my stainless steel wire loops. Perhaps the designers never intended it to be rebuilt with wire.

The pump's shaft looks like this.

The black plastic attachment on the shaft sits at the back of the pump in recess.

An impeller fits over the shaft, and this fits into the pump.

A face plate clips over the front, and this provides the front support for the shaft.

Or should do.

Once it started wobbling, the plastic wore out within weeks.

My original repair worked, but now that the shaft is worn, I think it requires support over a larger length.

Remembering my hand made screws I made for my fishing lure eyelets, I figured I could make a sleeve to act as the front support out of yet more stainless steel wire.

I found a rivet with a slightly larger diameter shaft than the pump's shaft, and added a few coils of my stainless steel wire.

Trimmed the excess.

Leaving me with a convenient sleeve on a wire.

Then neatly installed the sleeve into the front plate using the wire to wrap around the pump, and stop it from falling out.

The project was rushed a little because I had no water flowing through the aquaponics system, but I had it finished within an hour and 15 minutes from when the pump stopped to when the water was flowing again.

I even managed to increas the flow rate from the 70LPH or so it was flowing at a few days ago as seen here...

To a new and improved 135LPH.

Not a bad result.

I have a new pump on the way, but I really need this one to last until I take delivery of it. 

It would also be nice to have this one still running so I have a backup if the new one fails at any stage.

I love wire.

.

Wind energy - Coiled again

I've been working hard at making more electrons do their thing.
But it's not working.
I'm not sure why.

I made some nice coils out of the coil I made before. I unravelled it and thought I should try to explore the relationship between the number of turns on my coil, and what I see on my multimeter.

I started by making a cardboard tube coil winder. I figured it would be best to at least have the size of the coil consistent. I found a few different designs to make a coil winder and all the good ones shared a few points.

The most important aspect to a coil maker is that you should be able to dismantle it a bit to let the coil out.

This looks pretty dismantleable to me. In fact it's trying to dismantle itself just because I'm looking at it.

The object here is to create a frame to coil the wire in so that it stays nice and neat.

If you put a little space under the disks, it should be possible to add some tape before we start winding the coil to hold it together even better. At least that's what those well designed coil makers have.

So if we poke something through from the back, we should be able to stick the tape onto it to allow us to draw it through.

This gives us a bed of sticky side up tape to lay the coil over.

Once it's through, you can hold the tape and the device in your left hand and add coils of wire with your right hand.

When you have added the desired number of coils you can mess about in such a was as to fold the tape over the coil before you dismantle the device.

The plan here is to avoid this.

Its best to work with a real friend, unlike the imaginary one I retain.

Thanks for nothing Ted.

Oddly enough, it all seemed to work pretty well.

I successfully made three neat and well formed coils.

One each of 25 turns, 50 turns, and 100 turns.







That is, it worked quite well until the making the electricity bit.

That bit didn't go so well.

Magnet wanger no flash

Magnet wanger with flash

I made a magnet wanger to make the magnets wang around really fast, but for some reason I registered only .2 of a volt

Here is the magnet rotating device (a stick with a magnet stuck to it attached to a motor) pictured top without the flash, and bottom, with flash to freeze the image so you can tell its there.

The bit of wood sticking out to the left holds the magnet. All the other tackle is as counter-balance to stop all the stuff on my desk from vibrating away. Unbalanced motors vibrate a lot.


The point here is that I had the magnet spinning over the coils very fast and quite close and got as close to zero result as I could, without simply not turning up on the day.

In the first test I did, I spoke of the electrons surging around within the coil. Those were my words, but I'm not sure I understood them. What if it wasn't just the magnet passing first on side of the coil then the other, but the simultaneous passing of the south pole on one side and the north pole on the other. Magnets have poles by the way. Actually I read they don't and magnetic poles are an illusion, but the site I read that on was way out of my league, so for now I'm sticking with "Magnets have poles". Sometimes illusions are handy.

So things that I might have done wrong possibly include, but are not necessary restricted to...

1. I used less magnets than my first attempt. Perhaps this arrangement wasn't powerful enough.
2. I had only one magnet. Perhaps I need a north and a south pole hitting opposite sides of the coil.
3. I had less turns on my coils. Even the biggest one had only 100. My first attempt had 157.
4. Perhaps my magnet was passing the coil slower. Or too fast???
5. Something/everything else

Its possible that there is a certain threshold below which you get nada, then suddenly you make some power. Some things work like that. I can't think of anything that works like that, but there must be some things that do.

Whatever it is, rest assured, I'll get to the bottom of it. I often finish what I start.

Handmade fishing lures - Wire

Wire is one of the greats. It's power lies in its ability to be made shorter and apply great tension, with the application of many small amounts of effort on the human's part.

Wire comes in many varieties. Some of which will stay in whatever shape you ask it to. Others will spring back into the shape they were in before.

Levers, gears, pulleys, hydraulics, and wire all act in ways that allow a lot of small force to exert a bit of large force. Its sometimes called mechanical advantage.

If you want to make something be under a stack of tension, make it out of wire and twist it. Twisting wire makes it shorter. A stack of twists makes it only a bit shorter. Many small amounts of energy that are required to twist some wire, get converted into a whole lot of tension, because all that moving of your arms is converted into only 1/2 an inch of shortening. If you had enough strands of wire connecting your house with your neighbor's, and twisted each strand until it was tight, then repeated for a few months, you could drag your houses together. So don't do that. Their house is close enough already.

I love wire. A predisposition to wire love is in my genes.

I made my experimental, hot glue shrimp lure by building up glue around a wire harness, but forgot to show how I made it.

I started with a drawing of the shape I wanted on piece of wood. Then hammered some nails in upside down so I'd have the sharp ends sticking up.

Place the nails so if you bend your wire around them, you'll get your shape.

The first one I made had the nails up the normal way but it wouldn't release the finished wire harness because the wire got stuck on the nail heads. The plan is to use the nails as a pattern or jig to bend the wire around.

Bend the wire zig zag through the jig, making sure you go around the nails on the correct side so that the nail forces the bend the way you want it.

Grip the loops in a vice and twist the end around itself.

Trim the ends with the cutters you borrowed from your mum a few years ago, and never got around to returning.

After you release it from the vice, you will just need to straighten it up a bit. 

And its done.

The alternative to this continuous single wire construction, or through lure construction, is to use screw in eyelets at each of the three points. The advantage of having all your wire loops connected to each other is that if you catch a fish big enough or with teeth sharp enough to break your lure, there will still be a good connection between the fish and your rod. 

Added to this is the bragging rights you get by making a lure that still caught the fish even though the lure was bitten in half, and the fact that you don't go hungry.

Handmade fishing lures - Hot glue shrimp

Once upon a time in Japan, I happened across a man in a stall on the side of the road during some new years festivities. He was making animal shaped lollipops out of hot toffee. Each one took around a minute to make. They looked a bit like those glass collectible things that are all over the globe, but mounted on toothpicks. He was selling them to a stack of people three or four deep all waving wads of cash at him. They sold for around $10 each. He had a buddy handy to take the cash, so he didn't have to waste any productive time dealing with customers.

Sometimes it can take a few hours to do something that, with practice, you may one day be able to do in few minutes.

A week ago I had the idea that I might be able to make a lure from the plastic that my hot glue gun provides.

glue gun, plastic, and wire

I started with a glue gun, a small square of plastic (from the un-needed dividers in my new tackle box), and some wire.

In anticipation of this lure being too heavy at the back, I added two small lead weights by crimping them to the wire.

Reflective card 

I found some laser cut reflective card from some thoughtful person, who at some stage in the past, thought I was too sober, so bought me a bottle of wine.

Thanks.

I cut some bits out of the gift card to form the basic shrimp body shape.

half glue added to create basic shape

Next step was to build up a bit of hot glue to form the front and back, with the narrow waste I had a feeling might look like a shrimp.

finished shape

This looks a lot like a shrimp to me. It's surprising how easy this kind of thing is. I realize this in no masterpiece, but it's not as if I have any hot glue shaping skills here either.

The best thing about hot glue is you can heat it up over a flame and rework it.

This shape took about an hour of reheating, cutting bits off, and adding bits to replace the bits I just cut off.

finished hot glue glass shrimp lure 

With only a bit of imagination, it's possible to imagine this actually catching a fish.

Anyone paying more attention than they should, may notice that there are wire loops and a bib that give the impression that the lure would be towed from the front. But, after changing its shape a dozen times, I think this lure would work best twitched off the bottom, then allowed to sink back down. The fish would attack it as it sunk. To have it swim like a shrimp, it would need to be towed from the back, as when fleeing, shrimp panic backwards with flicks of their tail. The middle hook cluster would hang from the wire loop at the belly of the lure, but the hook that would be the rear should hang from the bottom of the front of the shrimp. In other words, that loop at the top, should be at the bottom.

The total length of this particular experiment is 95mm.

Aquaponics - Overflow

I clawed my way out of my sickbed at the crack of noon today to discover my fish tank overflowing.

Growbed on top of fish tank

My new aquaponics arrangement looks like this.

I think it looks quite neat in its new position and new configuration, but sometimes looks can be deceiving.

Deformation of the fish tank causing a spill

A behind the scenes peek reveals a bit of a problem with distortion.

The existing frame was slightly thinner when turned on its side, and no longer affords support to the side of the fish tank.

The result was to allow the half barrel to deform in such a way as to spill water out. Luckily it didn't spill enough to endanger fish or pumps.

Pumps, like fish, hate it when there's no water overhead. I'm not really sure what fish see in it, but pumps tend to use water as lubricant, and for cooling.

wire holding fish tank in shape

As usual wire came to the rescue. I wrapped it around the entire thing.

wire tangle

I then twisted it into this traditional Australian wire knot known as a "Tangle".

The Australian history of using wire to solve our problems is similar to that of the Swiss in the making of the holes in Swiss Cheese.

I really like the way this camera captures blue.