Quote:
Originally Posted by TheGreatPhil
Hey, thanks for replying. What kind of speed were you looking at for complete up/down travel, and what kind of difficulties did you have with the engineering?
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Pretty broad question Batman!
Don't remember honestly. It was fairly quick... but not dangerously so. You could probably calculate it from watching the match videos. A 3 second traverse of the tower perhaps? (so about 2 feet/second).
We had a lot of fabrication difficulties. If I were to do it again, especially without access to such a great aluminum welder, I'd do it with a square tube mast. If you used a cut up belt, you would save yourself a lot of machining time (especially if you don't have your own equipment). The hinge is important. Ours was not strong enough, so we ended up just pinning the tower at 6 feet tall. If we had planned to make the hinge strong from the beginning, we could have left it actuated. We had to use a junky piano hinge from the hardware store McMaster sells much more substantial ones. There are big shock loads as it comes upright.
As you can see from the last picture in the gallery, you can literally do this with a cut up belt, pulley, and 2x4.