We stripped a gear wrench “ratchet” climbing yesterday. The fall twisted our chassis some. Any ideas on a better method to stay at the top of the rope?
You stripped it a gear wrench?
As best as I can gather, you have a roller climber on a hex shaft, and you stripped a gear (or something) because of the ratcheting wrench prevented the shaft from moving. Is this correct? Can you describe your mechanism in greater detail, and the scenario surrounding the failure?
We stripped the wrench. Our answer right now is to feather the climber to hold it at the top or get a better quality rachet, gear wrench
I can’t see how the weight of the robot would strip a reasonably good 1/2 ratcheting wrench on a hex shaft (unless you had a gigantic spool - like 2ft in diameter).
Perhaps you have a very torquey climber and driving the climber motor backwards against it (by accident) damaged it?
Regardless, I’d recommend replacing it with a decent ratcheting wrench.
We used a wrench last year and this year and have never experienced that issue. What is your spool size and rope diameter? Was it a name brand wrench?
+1
To put some numbers onto his first statement, a decent ratchet wrench should not break when the reasonably heavy user, say 200lbs, puts their entire weight onto the end. After all, a decent tool shouldn’t break under normal usage. That’s a weight heavier than a robot on a longer lever arm than most robots’ climber drums. If the wrench can take that, it can definitely take the robot’s weight.
Of course, that’s all a thought experiment assuming reasonable quality for tools. All I know for sure is, a harbor freight ratchet wrench was strong enough for our robot.
We’re using one of the cheapest ratcheting wrenches we could find. It works perfectly fine. We’ve accidentally stalled a 64:1 CIM motor against it for 10ish seconds, no damage whatsoever. I’m very interested in how you actually managed to break one.