Can we handle the power?

Well,

The ATU that I am making for Vince has finally neared completed. My mate Paul completed the drilling of the metalwork for me; after my recent experience with drill bits I decided to let someone who knows what they are doing have a go!

So here are some pics of the nearly finished article:

The quality front panel labels are courtesy of my recent e-Bay purchase of a Brother label printer:

The problem we have now is that the turns counter we bought has a metal front panel piece. This (which I thought was plastic) is connected directly to the metal shaft which in turn is coupled to the metal parts of the roller coaster and is therefore at full RF potential. This is dodgy because we don't want that potential near the user and also because the front panel itself is at ground; the screws holding the turns counter to the front panel are actually causing a short circuit.

An initial attempt at getting past this problem by using some isolating washers (the kind of thing you would use to isolate a TO3 transistor from a heatsync) between the screws and the two other metal bits has resulted in a rather spectacular light show at about 40-50 watts. Clearly no good, and even if it worked electricaly, the metal part of the turns counter would still be at full RF potential, dead ATU  users makes for little or no repeat business, so this is no use whatsoever!

I'm going to get my aforementioned chum Paul to try and make be a plastic shaft coupler... we will have to see how that works out.

You can see the offending article at the very top centre of this picture, it's all at full RF potential:

To finish, here's a recent picture of the Geddy cat:

Al good fun though, egh?