Drone crank modification
A heavy lifting drone with an alignment problem inside the engine
One of our regular customers was having an issue with the positioning of a pulley within the engine of their drone. The alignment of the drive pulley with it’s matching water pump pulley was not quite correct.
Planning out the best method
Initially the idea was to just mount the balance weight to a magnetic chuck and grind the taper to position the drive pulley up to its gauge line. This should bring it in line with the opposite water pump pulley. However, after some discussion, we came up with an improved plan.
Our Kellenberger CNC grinding machine is capable of accurately grinding up to 1 metre along the Z-axis. We decided to grind the taper of the balance weight in situ on the actual crank itself.
Smart CNC universal grinding
We wanted to ensure that the pulley could be accurately mounted to the taper of the balance weight in precisely the correct position. In addition, we could be sure that it was ground concentric to the crank itself, this would reduce any vibration caused by run-out.
We ground the taper of the balance weight using the second wheel head with a taper dressed onto it until the pulley had reached its gauge line. The result was a satisfying solution using smart problem-solving.
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