I'm can't easily imagine how stong 5Nm is, but since you mention 12V, perhaps 
an automotive door-opening solenoid might work for you?  These are popular on 
hotrods to pop doors and trunks open with a switch.  The best source of this 
would be to look thru an issue of "Street Rodder" magazine since it has tons 
of ads for stuff like this.  Some sites I can remember are autoloc.com, and 
autodax.com.  A google search for "door open solenoid" should bring up a 
bunch.

Cheers,
-Neil.


On Tuesday 12 July 2005 07:16 pm, Gerhard Fiedler scribbled:
> 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


-- 
http://www.piclist.com PIC/SX FAQ & list archive
View/change your membership options at
http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/piclist