One For The Technically Minded

[Flying Wild]

Can anyone help shed light on the gyro pictured below?
The blurb for it claims it is an old missile gyro.
It still has some wires coming out of it (I opened up the top and the end of the vertical gymbal looks similar to the commutator/brush arrangement on a DC motor), so I thought it might be interesting if I could get power to it to get it to spin up without having to utilise a can of air duster.
Any help gratefully received.

http://img67.imageshack.us/img67/2213/collgyroso6.jpg

Apologies if this is the wrong forum, but I figured that with this being an ex-military item...

[splitbrain]

Spin it up with extreme care. Gyros are not things to be messed with lighly; I once watched the inertial platform from a harrier GR3 do an impressive loop on the end of an umbilical cable (after someone picked it up whilst it was running), and smash itself to oblivion on the hangar floor.

[N Joe]

If there's a part no. or similar on it, Jane's does all sorts of publications that list aerosystems components that might help you find out what it is (or you might find a similar no. that gives a clue to the manufacturer).

If you've got no markings, I'm reduced to a statement of the bleedin' obvious: the size of gyro might give you an idea of the type of missile it came from. Obviously one from say, a MANPAD (if it needed a gyro at all) would be much smaller than one from say, a cruise missile.

N Joe

[Flying Wild]

The only markings that I can see are on the top (on top of the brown dome).
One marking is 2-84 (perhaps denoting date of manufacture as Feb 84?)
The other is an embossed N with the figures 02549 etched into the casing. Probably a serial number.

[Blacksheep]

The gimbal system says its a space or vertical gyro and it doesn't have the extra gimbal that would give it the full six degrees of freedom required to allow manouevers beyond and through the vertical - as in a master reference gyro. Spinning it up would be safe enough as long as you leave it mounted in the gimbals. Most of the military gyros I've worked with were painted black and they would have either (a) for British use - the arrow symbol with a stores Section/Ref number e.g. 6A/XXXX or 6B/YYYY or (b) for U.S. or NATO, a Federal Stock Number e.g. 6445-XXXX-YYYY on them somewhere.

Ah, those white coated days in the instrument calibration laboratory, gently toppling gyros to measure erection rates on the test platform, come back to me. Then I wake up screaming...

[toddbabe]

who cares you saddo! chuck it back in the bin you got it from.