Hello all! The past 2 weeks have been filled with onboarding, development, shipments, design, and organization.
Shop techs have all started with initial tasking of wiring and shop organization/ layout.
Unfortunately I had some production parts delivered to Texas….our shop is 800miles (1287km) away in Denver. I’m working with UPS to try and retrieve this.
Hardware
We’re working on getting our Molex auto crimper up and running with the wire terminals that we bought and have in the shop. It’s an older model so we had to source some used parts to reconfigure it for our needs. We ran into some slight issues trying to get this dialed since there’s not much documentation on the older machine but once this is up and running, we’ll be crimping away!
There may be some ambiguity so just want to be up front and clear. The past few months have involved finalizing what we thought would be small design tasks like steam wand mounting/ routing and pressure gauge/ transducer mounting. When reviewing the designs there were much more optimal methods which would improve performance, reliability, and ease of assembly.
One example would be steam routing. I originally had a “straw” tube that went from the top of the boiler down through the bottom and into a steam manifold underneath. This steam manifold held the pressure release valve and steam line up to the valve/ wand. This was a simple approach but created difficulty when figuring out how to secure the valve and all the lines. The long line length and many fittings were not optimal for potential leak points and wet steam from condensation through the long lines.
This has since (last month) been redesigned into a steam channel machined directly into the bottom of the top plate that passes steam directly from the top of the boiler to a new steam manifold mounted on the upper boiler flange. Not only does this reduce potential failure points, but it also provides more powerful and dry steam. This also allows us to mount the steam wand valve directly into the manifold which is secured directly to the main chassis.
While this did require changes to the top plate and boiler flange, this allows us to close out what was originally intended to be a small detailed design task. This new design will also allow us to sell a blockoff plate for those who wish to remove the steam wand. We will not offer the Argos without a steam wand since we already have too many configurations to keep up with but we will eventually get this block off plate added to the store for customers to purchase and install with detailed instructions that we will provide.
Without going into too much detail, this month has been spent reworking the pressure gauge/ transducer mounting to improve reliability and functionality. This design tasking has also been closed out and we’ll be able to freeze the design in the coming week to place the rest of our orders.
Part drawings are in progress to capture the updated design.
I do not intend significant delays from these design updates as we will have as much as we can sent to us by air instead of sea shipping to kick off chassis build sooner. I will try to add more detail to these updates to keep people more in the loop about the status of production but I have had several people stop by the shop to pull shots on the prototype machine all with great feedback.
You can check out the updated checklist here.
Black Argos next to the Kafatek Monolith.
Black Argos next to the Kopi Deva.
Software
Fluid level sensor and new steam switch integration testing is still being worked on. We were hoping that we could get a mechanical steam switch which would allow us to run an LED in series to be powered on when the steam switch is on.
Unfortunately, the small switches are all momentary which mean will need to reconfigure some things on the board and have the fluid level indicator tapped into the sensor circuit which is currently being tested and should be a small update to the board.
Sincerely,
Ross Ainsworth