Re: The joy of FORTRAN

On Sun, 9 Mar 2025 04:43:37 -0400, c186282 wrote:

   Still thinking about the low->high pressure "hydraulic transformer"
   ........ something like a big piston driving a small piston, maybe
   with mechanical leverage involved ....
   but CAN be done. The 'plumbing' analogy holds.

We inadvertently built one of those when a check valve was installed
backwards. If you think about a double-acting cylinder the side that is
used to apply force is the full diameter of the cylinder. The other side
only needs enough area to retract the cylinder, so the rod fills most of
it with only a small annular area.

Put the check valve in the retract circuit and try to move the ram by
pressuring the other side with, say, a 15:1 difference in the areas and
2000 psi and you develop 30,000 psi, enough to bulge a 12" cylinder. The
bulge wasn't visible but was enough so the piston wouldn't seal.

Big chunk of scrap. Even worse it came from a British firm and they were
having one of their dock strikes so the replacement had to be air
freighted.

On r/embedded a young intern was worried because he had smoked a sensor on
a $80 development board and wondered how much trouble he was in. I was
thinking "Kid, you haven't even started to screw up.".