jasonhc73
Cat herder, and dog toy tosser.
How did you manage to break the north/southlinear activator?
In my zeal to "balance" my tracker it slipped and sort of thudded. What I didn't notice is that when it slipped, the entire E/W shifted about 5 inches south.
That took the E/W actuator out of alignment with its push/pull origin and its insertion points.
I didn't notice this until the next day when the panel stopped tracking E/W about 10:30 AM.
That afternoon I was "fixing" more on the contraption and noticed the off-ness of the tracker.
The internal connection of the linear actuator snaped at the exact spot where the internal gears turn the long screw. Unfixable. These 12V actuators are actually pretty nice internals with all-metal gears, however, even the nicest things don't like to be used wrong.
On the bright side, I ordered 6000N actuators to replace these 1200/1500N actuators. 6000N actuators use a worm gear vs the lighter duty actuators with in-plane gears.
Now I have a one-axis tracker for a few days.