Galcon valve

escorrial · Wed Dec 24, 2014 9:46 am

Hi folks!

Been doing lots of reading on the site and have built three pneumatic cannons so far. Two work great and my coaxial needs a different style piston. The first sprinkler valve setup I made was a 1" orbit modified per instructions here and it works well. So I went searching for a 2" valve. I found this and purchased it through Amazon.

: Battery operated solenoid/programmer

: Galcon valve

It's a pretty robust design as you can see. It also has a solenoid with a timer and a manual open/close button which all runs off a 9 volt battery. When I connected my air chamber and pressurized it I found that the opening was pretty slow. So I decided to modify the valve as I had done with the 1" Orbit valve above. When I took it apart and compared it to the disassembled Orbit valve I found that the Galcon valve is a barrel sealing design rather than chamber sealing. It also had a pin through the diaphram. Uh-oh. So I did some more reading.

I noticed that the housings are basically the same and that if I just turned it around (reverse flow direction) the valve would essentially function as a chamber sealing design. So then I looked for equalization holes. There was one for the solenoid and one through the middle of the diaphragm where the pin passed through. I sealed the solenoid orifice with epoxy and left the diaphragm hole open. Cut the pin and removed it (deliberated a bit but decided to just take the chance). Then I drilled and tapped the blowgun release you see in the picture. I did not modify the blowgun except to cut off the hanging hook thing on the top. Connected to my chamber and pressurized and checked for leaks. No major problems. Really slow leak only. Test fired and it worked surprisingly well! Only difference is that I'm getting about 1 second of air release from the blowgun before the valve opens.

I'm thinking I need a bigger pilot valve so I'm gonna try that first. Found a blowgun made by Husky at HD that looks like a pistol and seems to be of much larger internal bore than the one in the picture. So my questions are: Is anyone else using this valve? Are there any issues running this reversed?

Thanks for all the great info!