[Jamie Kalb]

Wow! Thanks for such a detailed response. I'm still amazed that the paint came out so well.

Yeah, I had seen that Andy Baker presentation before, but never fully understood quite how the cascade system worked. Your explanation makes a lot of sense, with very useful pictures, as usual. My team had some interesting situations with not being able to predict the postion of the middle stage midway through the travel, so the cascade routing is something we might experiment with.

One more question: do the springs in the chain also act as counterweights to offset the elevator weight, or are they just there for tensioning/shock absorbing?