We were very lucky that our team member Jovan has some family friends that are cabinet-makers. We passed them all of our engineering drawings and they built us a custom cabinet, gratis! The only thing we had to manufacture ourselves were the custom parts of the pulley cylinder.
The three pieces on the left were designed in Inventor, and then milled from aluminum slabs on a CNC milling machine. The top piece is the disk for the pulley handle. The smaller holes line up with the middle piece, which serves as a locking mechanism for the pulley system, once a locking pin is inserted. The bottom piece are stoppers that press-fit onto the PVC pipe that the pulley rope winds around. These stoppers stop the rope from coiling off the pipe and getting in the way of other mechanisms. |
With all of our parts manufactured, our alpha prototype was ready for action!