February 23rd, 2010 by Tom Scarince
I recently saw a potential demand for a product that was essentially a seamless rectangular metal cup, about 1″ x 3″ on the open end and about 4″ deep. This sounded like a job for a process called “deep drawing.” In this process, a flat sheet of metal is punched through a die to form a cup shape.
Great, all I need are a few prototypes to verify the design, then a few tens of pieces for some tentative test marketing, and finally perhaps a few thousand a year for production. One problem: for a deep drawn part, a “short run” is considered “less than 60,000 pieces.” I could find only one company that could actually deliver sample parts, but none of their standard sizes were close enough to what I needed.
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Posted in Manufacturing | No Comments »
April 23rd, 2009 by Tom Scarince
The town of Mora in Sweden is known for its traditional and utilitarian fixed-blade knives. Many survival and bushcraft experts recommend these simple and very inexpensive knives, especially for beginners. This article was originally posted by me on the Equipped to Survive Survival Forum.
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Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »
April 16th, 2009 by Tom Scarince
This article explains why you might want to use mixed decay and how it is implemented in the A3977’s current chopper PWM scheme with the percent fast decay (PFD) pin.
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Tags: A3977
Posted in Stepper Motors | No Comments »
April 7th, 2009 by Tom Scarince
Once you understand unidirectional PWM of an inductive motor load, we can expand the concept to a bidirectional h-bridge PWM circuit. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Motor Control | No Comments »
April 2nd, 2009 by Tom Scarince
This article covers unidirectional Pulse Width Modulation (PWM) and how it can be used to control the power applied to a DC motor or the current in a stepper motor winding, for instance. While we eventually want to talk about doing bidirectional PWM with an h-bridge, we’ll start with a simple, one-direction control circuit.
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Posted in Motor Control | No Comments »
March 26th, 2009 by Tom Scarince
An h-bridge is a bipolar driver circuit that is often used to control a load such as a brush type DC motor. This article covers the most basic concepts of a simplified h-bridge circuit. Later articles dig deeper into the details of practical h-bridge operation and design.
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Posted in Motor Control | No Comments »
March 20th, 2009 by Tom Scarince
This article explains the important points in converting a standard Beckett AFG oil burner to burn waste motor oil, used ATF, fryer grease or waste vegetable oil in your experimental furnace, heater or boiler. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Energy | No Comments »
March 20th, 2009 by Tom Scarince
Biodiesel may be reliably burned in a standard home oil burning furnace or boiler with a few minimal modifications accomplished with off the shelf parts.
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Posted in Energy | No Comments »
March 19th, 2009 by Tom Scarince
Stepper motors may come with four, five, six or eight wires. This article will help you identify the correct way to wire an unknown stepper motor. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Stepper Motors | No Comments »
March 19th, 2009 by admin
Welcome to THS Engineering’s new and improved website. We’re looking forward to posting a steady supply of technical articles, so stay tuned.
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