Floating Air Sampling Unit

 

This was a quick job early summer ’14.


floatingairsamplingrig

This rig holds a series of sealed glass vials.  Each of hese are impaled on a pair of hypodermic needles (the yellow sockets of which are visible to the left of center) connected to a set of  air sampling tubes, one for intake, the other maintains consistent volume in the vial. The dark colored block indexes the vials, and is interchangeable with another of it’s type, to allow mounting of a larger volume vial.  The upper clamping plate ensures that the vial array does not work it’s way loose from the hypos.  This part has two different diameter sockets to permit two different vial diameters.

This subassembly is part of a floating array designed to sample aquatic gas emissions.

I made the central lower channel and the feet.  Good jobs for the Scotchman and Bridgeport. The parts aren’t complicated, but tolerances had to be on the money, as more than one vendor was involved in parts manufacture.

One of the issues on this project, (not so much for me, but for the designer), is that there were far too many ‘change orders’ along the way, which ultimately increased the final cost per unit.

Some of the prototyped parts were discarded in favor of more complex pieces, which then weren’t really needed in the end.

For the most part, this comes down to communication.  The designer and end user should be in complete accord prior to making chips. Quite often the end users have only a passing understanding of how things are made, and sometimes they don’t really want to know so long as they get their parts on time.