Hello all,

I'm looking into moving a lever with a solenoid. It's around 5 Nm torque
and I need to move it 30 degree from a center position in both directions.
It comes back to the center position through its own spring force. My
thought was to use two solenoids and a lever of around 3 cm. That would
give a throw of 17 mm in each direction and a force of 150 N. It seems
that's something a solenoid can do. Needs to be for 12 V.

However, I didn't yet find a manufacturer of such solenoids in the USA.
Does anybody know some places I can start asking? The only one I found so
far is Kendrion http://www.kendrionmt.com/ , but they are in Europe.

I'm also looking into using starter solenoid coils. They probably only need
a steel rod added to them that they can pull. That may work.

The other question is how to switch such solenoids. From the Kendrion site
and the solenoid data sheets I found there, I imagine that it may take up
to 60 A to get the force I need. This doesn't seem impossible to switch
with MOSFETs or IGBTs, but I wonder how you get that current to and from
the transistor. A 10 A trace is already large. We don't really need a high
duty cycle, so maybe that works out, temperature-rise-wise. I was just
wondering... are there any special tricks to it? Even connecting the thick
wire to a circuit board seems tricky.

Thanks for any pointers,
Gerhard
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