Well the rain held off on Saturday long enough to do some short tests in the new test stand. Most of the morning was setting up all of the tie-downs. There are 8 lines supporting Goliath's weight. Two on each of the prop supports for redundancy. Eight lines are connected horizontally, two on each prop arm. Again there is some redundancy built in, so if a line fails or comes loose, the vehicle will still be secure. Underneath Goliath are four lines, each with about 3" of slack. These will come into play when doing to the hover test. Once Goliath has enough thrust it will lift upwards 3" until the lines are taut.

In addition to the test stand, there is a protective barrier setup (a sheet of plywood with a hole cut into for a camera to take video (nicknamed the bunker).

Two tests were run yesterday. The first, Test #9, was run for a short bit to check out how everything worked. We only took video from behind the bunker for this test. The belts seemed to have more oscillations in them than previous tests. This was not obvious from the video, but could see it from my vantage point. So I tightened up the tensioners and added a forward camera view and ran Test #10. Again the cameras didn't catch the oscillations, I need to get a better vantage point.

It could be that the wood dummy props were balanced better. I'm going to remove the props and balance them while they are attached to the pulleys to see if that makes a difference. The new flat belt idler seemed to hold up, so I'll probably switch out the other pulley were I can put a flat belt idler and move that HTD pulley to act as an idler on the double sided belt to try to dampen out the oscillations.

Overall the tests show that the test stand works well. Even though there is some give in the lines, the vehicle isn't bouncing all over the place. This setup should also work well for evaluating the controls once those are added on.