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Manbench Industries; Purveyors of general mayhem since 1994, a blog to follow the crazed, possibly deranged projects and emotive musings, of an undergraduate engineer, and an apprentice organ builder who have always felt they were born in the wrong age. Follow us as we, re-write history, learn lost skills, discover strange new worlds, break things, rant at things, mend things, make new things and generally find ways of passing the day instead of doing "proper work" !

Tuesday, 21 January 2014

Canal Lock Display

One from the past today - this was built for my GCSE Systems and Control project being built at the same time as my waterwheel display built for my GCSE Product Design project. Systems and Control was based around electronics and pneumatics and my task was to make a canal lock exhibition piece for a museum.

 The locks were opened and closed by a pneumatic ram mounted under the board as shown. It was so long ago that I can't really remember what all the wiring did, however, I think that there was a micro switch that gave a signal if the gates were open or closed and didn't allow the next process in the step to happen if the switch wasn't closed. Various other circuitry and chips controlled the paddles on the gates and provided an audible warning if there was a fault with the operation.

 As with these school projects, I got pretty bored come the end - far more emphasis on the 'journey' of design than actual engineering, but it got me an A* so I can't complain!



The Engineer.

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