There were a handful of related side-projects while building the robots. One of those was making a set of 4x heavy duty lift/hoist stands. Especially when wiring, as these beasties get heavier, aproaching their design weight, the stands come in invaluable with the electric hoist and the ability to swing / rotate them around or set them down on a cart to run them out to the garage, etc…
A couple construction photos…
I ended up making a couple different flavors to hold different robots with different mounting requirements…
I quite enjoy the following photo. Something about nice heavy duty parts hogged out of 1in material. If you look closely, you can see that I left a heavy chamfer at the bottom of each pocket to stress relieve the part and prevent cracks from forming over the years. That combined with the coatings will go a lnog way towards maintaining these for many many years to come.
In the image above the biggest compromise I made in the design was the use of stainless-steel screws. I had performed the original calculations based on the shear strength of grade-5 or better bolts. At the end of the project, I had stainless steel on hand, so I went ahead and used them. This substitution cuts down on the design margin / safety factor considerably.
The cable hoists are rated for ~800lbs when operated with the pulley in the configuration I’ve got it in. This is well more than enough, but as a future improvement, I ‘may’ go back and add a 2’nd double pulley configuration to both the top and bottom. The goal is not to increase the lifting capacity, rather it goal in doing that would be to drop the lifting speed by a factor or 4x.
Keeping a large amount of similarity between the 4x hoists lent itself well to mass production of some of the parts… The photo below is from “unboxing day” as I sent these parts out to a company (Aero Finnishing in Arlington Wa.) for anodizing.
The hardest part of this process was deciding where to mount these. They have a ~12in diameter base, each of which has 4x1/2in concrete anchors. Additionally the tops of all of them are connected by 3"x3"x1/4in wall tubing, so I’m not planning to move them any time soon. I have re-arranged the studio one time since I put them in and these layered in a signification number of constraints on that process.
This was one of the last big projects I did right before buying my AVIDcnc.
-Kenneth
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