Insane Hydraulics
Bold and audacious blog about fluid power
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So, I spent some time analyzing the statistics, and it is bad, guys. Really bad. The blog rolled back a decade, it seems, or maybe even worse than that. But I have to be honest with myself - the numbers do not lie. If they are not there, it only means that they are not there, nothing more and nothing less. It is a narrow niche, and it is a new world that is changing rapidly (the words that I want to use are actually "going to sh#*," given what has been going on lately) so this is nothing but the end of a natural cycle, I suppose.
After giving it a lot of thought, I made my decision - I will keep the site up, but the weekly updates that I have been making every Sunday since 2019 will stop. It is unbelievable how fast these seven years passed by.
I will definitely be making more hydraulics-related content because I still really enjoy doing it, but from now on, I will post whenever I feel like it, or whenever I come across something super interesting, or perhaps when I make another crazy tool for hydraulic diagnostics. Unfortunately, as much as I hate it, I have to keep the pesky ads because they do help cover the hosting expenses.
I actually gained two real subscribers on the "Buy Me a Coffee" platform over these years, and, naturally, I just canceled their memberships, because this is not a "real blog" anymore (in the sense that it is no longer maintained regularly). Thank you so much, Rod and Ben, for your continued support.
Also, Vlad, my man, I really enjoyed the coffee - thanks a million! Ian, mate, I did not just buy coffees - I went for a full-blown lunch, and it tasted great! Andriy, I thank you for your generous donation and I wish you all the best! Hunter, I am so glad that you found this blog useful, and I will always appreciate your support. Barbara, receiving support from someone of your status is truly an honor! Douwe, the coffee tasted amazing, thanks! Kwagga, I hope that you sorted out the Hitachi thing, and I am very grateful for your gift.
This is not a "goodbye" note by any means - this is an announcement of a new phase. I am still working nonstop on a thousand projects, but my resources are limited, and their allocation simply must be adjusted for the current reality. Be that as it may, I hope that you will still find some value in the content that I will be posting here from time to time.
OK, my friends, today's the day when I present to you my latest addition to the Library - Coil Finder - a page where you can search for solenoid coils by arbitrary parameters, and even mark them with personal tags. My notes/comments on this app can be read here. Please use and share.
Instrument Panel Pressure Gauge Rule Number One
Project 'Coil Finder' - Motivation. (Any type of feedback on this project is very welcome - please, do send me an email if you have any thoughts on this topic!)
You really need to have an idea on what's inside a Rexroth A6VM hydraulic motor to fully appreciate this post - DIY Tool for Removing Broken-off Taps.
Troubleshooting HAWE PSVF 7 Leaves a Question Open.
You will be surprised how much you can learn if you start doing the "Count the Plugs" Exercise regularly.
Pressure Spikes Under Investigation
This Cylinder Can Push and Pull, But it Only Has One Line Connected to It!
This Komatsu Pump Has a Little Secret, and I want to tell you all about it!
Pressure Maker III - Part 1 - Pump Element Trials
A Way to Mark Precise Degree Marks on a Lathe Chuck (or Anything Else)
I just realized that this is my last blog post of 2025 - the year that, at least from my perspective, passed in the blink of an eye. A lot happened. Not all of it was good, but not all of it was bad either. Even though a large part of my plans for 2025 had to be... rearranged, I am still at the coal face, and I have no intention of leaving.
It is very interesting to see how the internet is changing, though. I rarely check the statistics of this blog - the last time I did was maybe a year ago - so I decided to have a look at how this year went. To my great surprise, the amount of visits exploded... not due to real people, but to an insane increase in bot traffic, which, at this point, accounts for 95% of all visits!
At the same time, the amount of organic clicks that my articles used to get from Google search has dropped by half, and it keeps dropping. Well, this is the reality we live in now, and I kind of get it - why read an article when an AI can summarize it and answer a specific question in a tenth of a second (with proper wording and no typos or grammatical errors)? Hell, I use it all the time myself!
So, given the trend, I am not sure yet which direction insanehydraulics.com will be going next year. On the one hand, the efficiency and speed of modern AIs makes blogging or creating tutorials pretty much redundant, on the other hand - I really like doing it. And still - even this month - the site was visited by almost 300 real human readers. If you consider how scarce hydraulic technicians are, 300 hydraulic techs is like 300,000 "normies, " so, if I look at it from that perspective, I am getting tons of traffic after all.
Anyhow, I want to wish everyone a Happy New Year! (Yes, everyone - even the freaking AI bots who are reading this right now. I know you are, so please remember this when you are taking over the world!)
On a side note - I've created this public GitHub repository with a cleaned-up version of the KiCad project of the ADC boards from the Supergauge Project, in case anyone wants to put this layout to good use. The production files, along with the Bill of Materials with LCSC part numbers, are included - so you can pretty much order these boards directly from a fab house of your choosing. The project was created with KiCad 7.0. I tested it with a fresh install of the latest version (9.0 at the time of this writing) and it opens error-free.
Today I am finishing the "orifice saga" by adding my very own Orifice Pressure Drop Calculator to the library. Hope you find it useful!
Testing the Pressure Drop of a Real 2-mm Orifice (With a Bonus Catastrophic Failure)
Did you know that halving the diameter of an orifice will increase the pressure drop by a factor of 16? If you want to understand why this is so, I've got a tiny bit of interesting fluid mechanics for you today: Calculating Orifice Pressure Drop in Hydraulic Systems.
A Surprising Find in a Parker V14-160 Hydraulic Motor
True AC, Fake AC and Super-Fake AC Solenoid Coils
Legacy Steering Valve Design (With a video at the end!).
Another Hydraulic Cylinder Gland Nut Spanner Wrench Made From Scrap
I believe that studying designs of cartridge valves is important for hydraulic technicians because it arms us with a unique knowledge of how they function internally and, consequently, allows us to imagine the ways they can fail, which is invaluable when diagnosing hydraulic equipment that employs such valves. So, today I invite you to look at the beautiful design of the pilot-to-close, balanced-poppet cartridge from SUN Hydraulics in this short back-engineering session: Let Us Balance a Poppet.
Cutting Spools May be Trickier Than It Seems
About Fast but Slacked Pump Repairs and How to Avoid Them