Tonight we built new, high amp switch boxes, installed a stainless line filter, and flushed out our plumbing. We put a manual ball valve on the test stand hose, and tanked it up with a couple gallons of water. When you cracked open the ball valve, water would spray out rapidly, but when fully opened, the water would cut back to a relatively small stream, and the behavior changed when you tried it again.
This was highly bizarre. We suspected we might have a collapsed hose, but when we disconnected the hose from the bottom of the tank, a ball, a spring, and a couple chunks of white plastic fell right out of the tank. We disassembled some things, and found that one of our regulated pressurization check valves was now a straight through tube. This is positively where the little plastic bit on the valve seat came from, and now that I think back on it, we may have had this check valve in line with the solenoid way back when we saw the plastic on the valve seat before. This was an all stainless steel and Teflon check valve, but the Teflon had gotten rather hard and crumbly, and eventually fallen apart. This was one of our very early purchases, so it had been exposed to peroxide over a year ago, and may have been slowly deteriorating since then, even though it hasn't been in peroxide flow service with much of any regularity at all. Mark Henry (ex Beal propulsion engineer) had mentioned to us once that not all Teflon is completely peroxide compatible, and this seems to be an example of that. Unfortunately, industrial suppliers don't make a distinction. After capping off where the check valve used to be, we reloaded the tank with water, and everything flowed the way it should. We put the solenoid back that we had cleaned out, and it also flowed fine, although it seems to have picked up a tiny leak, probably from getting a dent in the valve seat. John Carmack _______________________________________________ ERPS-list mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.erps.org/mailman/listinfo/erps-list
