Monday 11 March 2013

Progress on the HOG drive

I have been working on the HOG drive a bit recently, I went to the local dollar store and found a few hemispheres that I thought might work:
A rubber ball that could be cut in half, a plastic wind up toy, and a rubber "popper" also shown are the bell from the motor I am using, and an epoxy putty stick from harbour freight tools.

Eventually I settled on using the smiley face popper, because it was already a half-sphere, it was rubberey (good traction) and it had a nice center hole right in the middle. I kneeded up some epoxy putty (REALLY nasty smell...) stuffed it into the popper, and pressed it onto the face of my motor (I had cut down the shaft erlier, and thredded two nuts for more surface area for the putty to grab on.), made sure it was centred, and let it cure for 24 hours, here is the result:

From just eyeballing it, the hemisphere is perfectly centered, and spins fine and true at 8000 RPM. The putty ensures that the ball will not deform at high speeds, and has had no problem holding together at those ridiculesly high speeds. Speaking of high speed, I did some calculations, and the theretical top speed of this thing is going to be somewhere over 150 Km/h, not bad for something so small....

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