Help finding a "small" linear actuator???

Have you looked at stepper motor lead screw actuators?

Dear jpoge66:

If you don't need much in the way of positioning, except at two extremes, a solenoid would be just the ticket.

David A. Smith

Model airplane servos and some leverage?

MG

How about a voice coil (similar to solenoid)

The medical electronics industry does a lot of fluid handling on a small scale. There's a potentially huge market for 'syringe drives', of 60mm stroke or so.

Several manufacturers have attempted to crack it, but it's a tough market, for some odd reasons.

In some applications, the motion has to be ultra- smooth, because the motor drives a syringe that pushes fluid through a very small pipe, and the area ratio between the syringe and the pipe amplifies position errors and mechanical noise.

You always wind up trying to sell to electronics engineers, who think that a hole punched in a sheet of aluminum is a perfectly good bearing, and can't understand why everything except electronics costs actual money.

Or, worse, the electronics engineers are busy, and you talk to the 'mechanical designers', who are really drafters and not very good ones, and are even more clueless about mechanical stuff because they don't realize the depth of their ignorance.

And you're always competing with the inside guys who will buy one of your products and knock off a cheap copy, with just the features they need for one application.

-Mike-

-- snip --

Which is, of course, what an "inside guy" is supposed to do in a high-volume environment -- why pay _me_ tons of money for features you don't need when _you_ can spend pounds of money copying the the design features that are essential for you?

Check out

Try pneumatic actuators such as those Manufactured by Festo.

JPG

Interesting reply, Mike, and your comments about selling to small-minded myopics parallel my own experiences in some ways. Certainly I can imagine the accuracy problem with such as "syringe drives", but I rather don't think I'd be as interested in driving syringes as I would be in positioning them (or something else) on small scales. Small scale programmable XYZ positioning robots, basically. If Jason's experience accurately reflects a very limited market availability of small positioning linear actuators then perhaps there might be a market there. Maybe (!) I'm just hoping someone can suggest such a niche. One niche leads to another (sometimes). Say, wasn't there a song with lyrics like that?

Regards, Mark

Mike Halloran wrote:

Check out the motor in the new remote control cars that are about an inch long.

The motor is supposed to be about 1/4 inch od.