Tons of Projects!

A couple of years ago, I bought a Karcher pressure washer to hose off my dirt bikes. With very infrequent use (my bikes are often put away dirty), the damn thing broke. I took it apart to find that the cheap-ass plastic pump had cracked. Replacement parts are unavailable and if you could get them, they would cost almost as much as a new unit. DON'T buy Karcher stuff! Here's the barely used junk about to get tossed into the recycle bin:


So I bought an "AR" brand. That stands for Annovi Reverberi, THE manufacturer of most of the actual pumps that are in most brands of pressure washers. For the same specs (1.3 gallons per minute, 1,450 psi), the AR just KICKS ASS! I immediately took it apart and found a high quality die cast pump housing...REAL stuff in an inexpensive product.




And here, I'm painting the fan with a marker to cover up all but 2 shiny stripes for my optical tachometer. I needed to know how fast it runs. (it runs 8500 rpm at the motor, before gear reduction, BTW).


About to fire it up to get the speed measurement. Note handheld optical tachometer:


Here, I'm milling the bottom of the pump so I'll have a flat surface when I flip it over to mount it to the milling table for measurement purposes.


Here, I'm using the milling machine with its digital readouts to reverse engineer this thing. I've gotta hurry up and reverse engineer it and come up with a design. It's Saturday and time to GO RIDE, so I need to put my brand new deal back together to hose off the bike!


So WHY am I measuring my brand new pressure washer pump?? Well, WHAT'S this?? It looks like a Honda GX-25 engine that has been mated to a badass mini-alternator. WTH??


And now the pump is next to that whole assembly. You thinking what I'm thinking?


And here's the solid model design with enough detail that I can reassemble the pressure washer and be able to continue with the design phase: