Guys were back on our quest to make a simple homemade rope-making machine. One that you can just use a simple cordless power
drill to make rope all by yourself at home. Now in my last video I showed you how to build this unit.
This is a hook spinner that uses a little piece from a bicycle inner Tube to spin these pulleys that we made and
spin all three hooks at the same time. The purpose of this project today is to build out the rest of the system to automate it
so one person by themselves can make rope with the simple press of a button.
It's time to chop some wood.
So update guys. We just chopped up a bunch of different pieces of wood here
I've got these things cut to eight and a half inches long and I got a piece of board here six inches tall and here's why:
Normally when you're making rope you'll have length of string running out from these hooks and another person with some kind of mechanism on the end holding on to it.
But if we take these pieces of wood and pinch them in between these two by twos
we can screw that nice and tight together, clamp it down to the table and that right there will hold the end of the string for us.
So let's rig it up, run a little string, and see if it works.
Feels like I'm riding some crazy space motorcycle.
Alright, so update guys.
I just cut some wood and I put this little device together all this is is a six-inch piece of common board as well as eight and a half inches of our two by twos on the bottom to secure it as a base.
The idea is that as you're running sisal from our little hook spinner we're going to need something to hold it at the other end
if we clamp this down to the table we can loop it over this hook, and that should hold it securely in place.
But there are a few other factors that will come into play that will cause us a problem. I'll show you what I mean.
So I've just taken our sisal and you can see I've strung it through all the different loops starting with the one at the
back and then around each of the hooks and back to the hook at the back now after doing this six times we've got six different chords on three different hooks.
Now the idea is that as each hooks begins to Spin the two cords attached to it will intertwine with each other and then eventually all three of those cords will mesh together to make a nice three stranded rope.
But the problem with this setup is sisal is extremely fibrous and so as those strands begin turning, you can see they bind and cling up to each other.
And it is where you'd normally where you would need another three to five people to stand there and hold the ropes apart and keep them from latching each other.
The other thing we noticed as the strands are twisted it creates quite a bit of tension on the backboard and if nothing is done about it either the backboard is going to snap right off or the strands are going to break.
So the two challenges we face is: How do we release tension on the strands as they're being wound? and, How do we prevent the strands from binding on each other?
This is the solution I have for you:
I've cut two small blocks, these are three inches tall and six inches wide.
This came from the same common board we built this entire system from.
To alleviate the tension I'm going to drill a hole through the backboard and tie it to a counterweight that pulls a little bit of tension, but allows it to rise up as the cord is pulled.
This will be attached to a couple of swivel hooks that will allow the rope to spin freely as it needs to and this last block we'll make into something called the Ropemaker's Top.
It'll help guide those strands into the beautiful three stranded cord. You might expect to see.
So update guys.
Here we are we have done a lot of work today,
we've rigged up the system, and it's all clamped to the bench, the question now is, will it all work?
We have a hook spinning system that's powered by a cordless drill
on the back end we have a support board that accommodates the counterweight system that hooks up to a set of double swivel hooks.
We've added two ropes between the spinner mechanism and the backboard and that's to accommodate this automated rope making top.
The idea is as the tension builds that will glide forward and guide the individual strands into place to form a three stranded rope.
So will this contraption work as advertised?
Will it glide as seamlessly as we hoped? We're going to find out in the next video because in the next project
we are making rope. Thanks for joining me for this project guys, I'll be looking for you the next one. Talk to you then.
Oh, excuse me, apparently that was too big of a drill bit, Whoops! Hahaha.