Mounting the auger drive motor. Step four of a DIY record.

Posted: November 19, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Hopper and Feed | Tags: , , , , , , | Leave a comment

In this step I mount the auger drive motor, it has a built in right angle drive and speed reducer which adds torque.  The motor comes complete ready for wiring and mounting using four screws.  Again I drew up the parts in SketchUp and then cut them out on the CNC plasma cutter, it was almost too easy.   The further I get down this path the more I take advantage of the CNC’s capabilities.  Note the rounded corners, I also added an extra hole on top of the motor mount plate to make adding a wire routing clip easier in the future.  I remade the worm drive plate to improve some of the adjustment capabilities and added at the same time some decoration, rounded corners and used less material.

I used a Lovejoy type shaft connector to connect the motor to the worm shaft with a Buna-N spider in between to minimize any vibration or backlash to the motor, although with the worm and worm gear combination there should be none.

Changed feed sprocket

Posted: January 4, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Arduino, Homemade Boiler, Hopper and Feed, LCD display | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

The New Year practically demands resolutions and change for the better.  So with that constant improvement theme in mind I am publicly stating my goal to lose 15#’s and so  I am starting from  195.7.  My second resolution is the constant improvement of the boiler.  So here we go……

Auger feeding failure  due to the motor stalling demanded the  sprocket change  on the auger motor feed assembly.   The sprocket I chose  doubles the torque available for feeding pellets.  Since the shaded pole motor is constant speed the program had to change to double the auger run time.  So taking the data I had gathered I changed the program in two ways.

New sprocket added

I changed the times to accommodate the speed change  demanded by the sprocket change and I changed the paradigm to have constant run time and vary  the dwell or off time.  The increased torque is a vast improvement and since the change it has had no problem feeding even  adding an entire bag of pellets at one time.

A second advantage of the change is the improvement of the LCD display.  I think that this problem is now fixed since the LCD has been running without garbling the characters for several hours, long past the time when the LCD would normally have failed.  By increasing the torque the auger feed motor is running at less amp draw and so it feeds back less to the relays.  I also grounded the relay in a more positive way.

LCD display

Feed test

Posted: November 30, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: Homemade Boiler, Hopper and Feed | Tags: , , , | Leave a comment

Hopper with pellets

The chain arrived from McMaster-Carr last night so today a friend and I hooked up the drive motor for the auger and we did a timing test.  The assumption is the pellets will yeild approx. 5000 BTU’s per pound.  So after running the auger for a minute we weighed the sample and with the weight we calculated the feed rate at approx. 30 secs every 2.5 minutes.  We will have to adjust the rate as needed for the test.  I got a great email from a friend with some useful suggestions for the code which is still having issues.  I incorporated all the suggestions  and look forward to more useful suggestions.

Auger Motor