pic: Recycle Rush Re-design Part 2

[Chris is me]

Originally Posted by GeeTwo

That would be "leaving the downstroke unpowered", which has been considered and largely discarded. Unless you have a separate mechanism to engage and disengage from the tote, your downstroke will have to work against some sort of spring action to get around the top edge of the tote. For reliable action, either the down stroke needs to be powered, or a spring return is needed, or the carriage must be heavy enough to force through the ratcheting action.

Depending on the design, this can be pretty trivial. Hinge-style tote lifters have nearly no resisting force in the opposite direction and if the weight of the carriage alone doesn't do it, a tiny amount of surgical tubing would.

Powering the lift in one direction and only lifting the top 4 totes reduces the number of powered strokes required to stack to 4, with half the travel of lifting the bottom tote as well. It is also probably much faster to do this as it takes a long time for a tote to settle on the bottom level. I would have to run the calculations for air consumption but this could make 3 or 4 stacks with a reasonably small amount of air; several Clippard tanks would do it.