[Drew4564]

Originally Posted by dominik.daners

My questions are: have you dismantled your tape measure and built a custom system for it, and secondly, it looks like you lift by the tape measure, how do you do that?

Your system works very well, a 15 second climb is impressive!!

Yes, we have dismantled our tape measure. The tape measure was cut into two ten-foot lengths and then attached to and spooled around a 1.625" hex-bore Colson wheel. This spool is housed in a 3D printed case that's just slightly bigger than the tape when spooled around the wheel.

An important detail is the 2" AM Stealth wheel four inches in front of the Colson spool wheel. This wheel forces the tape measure to extend instead of simply unspooling and making a mess inside the printed housing.

To answer your second question, we simply run the system in reverse! Because both the Colson wheel and the AM Stealth wheel are on driven shafts, we just drive both wheels backwards and the system winds back up. We have a servo-driven ratchet and pawl system on one of the arms to hold us in place once we've scaled.

Thanks for the excellent questions and the compliment, we appreciate it! If you'd like better pictures of the system, we're happy to share!