The Hydraulic Power Pack

A bit of snuffling around on Ebay finally turned up what is hopefully a suitable replacement for the engine-driven hydraulic pump:

In a previous life it was in a stock-picker, a kind of forklift where the operator rides up in the air with the forks.

Popping it open reveals the gear pump and a fairly modest amount of filtering on the suction:

Which hopefully should be sufficient as it'll be permanently hooked up to the main ram, so not much scope for crap to get introduced. I don't know terribly much about hydraulics, so to be sure I wasn't going to hurt it, instead of using the normal general-purpose agricultural hydraulic fluid that I'd normally dump into a tractor, I went and got it some Caltex Rando HD 46, which is pretty much a straight mineral oil.

The unit came with this block of solenoids - it's set up to supply two "single-acting" circuits. I'll only be using the top one, which appears to have a bigger hole, and the black one at the bottom that allows the oil to drain back into the tank when the platform is dropping.

At the top of the block there's some kind of pressure sensor, which I'd love to do something clever with, but it has 3 wires coming out the top and no indication of how it should be wired, so I doubt I'll be able to work out how to use it.

It's a 24v motor rated at 2.2kW - next thing is to get some batteries, hook this bad boy up and start moving some oil.