Iplayfarmer
Super Member
How much horizontal space do you have?
Could you take it 2 or 3 bites. I.e. drive forward 30 feet and tie off to something. Then back up and take a new bite on the rope. Repeat until done.
Tractor "funicula" ?
- Thread starter bcarwell
- Start date
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How much horizontal space do you have?
Could you take it 2 or 3 bites. I.e. drive forward 30 feet and tie off to something. Then back up and take a new bite on the rope. Repeat until done.
Artisan
Veteran Member
Post up some pics Lazy Bob!
A cheap winch ... Here is one w/ 87' of cable. Strap this to mother earth and attach jumper cables to it from a vehicle when your using it or attach a winch to a Class 2 Trailer Hitch Winch Mount and back up to the cliff and lower away. Just use Jumper cables again to power it.
Your going to be lowering a LOT more than lifting. I don't see issue, but again, refer to my first picture in my reply !
HERE is a 12,000Lbs winch, prob made in China, so what. Use it, then sell it for 100bux.
Obed
Elite Member
Lazy Bob,
Post up some pics Lazy Bob!
A cheap winch ... Here is one w/ 87' of cable. Strap this to mother earth and attach jumper cables to it from a vehicle when your using it or attach a winch to a Class 2 Trailer Hitch Winch Mount and back up to the cliff and lower away. Just use Jumper cables again to power it.
Your going to be lowering a LOT more than lifting. I don't see issue, but again, refer to my first picture in my reply !
HERE is a 12,000Lbs winch, prob made in China, so what. Use it, then sell it for 100bux.
If you are doing this a bunch, Artisan's idea should work great.
Another effective method that is simple and cheap would be to just use a rope and 2 carabiners. I've done some rock climbing and can easily lower another person down a cliff using equipment similar to this (but more specialized for climbers). Lowering your trailer down the hill would be no problem at all.
Tie one caribiner to a tree at the top of the hill. Tie the other caribiner to a tree at the bottom of the hill. Tie the rope to the trailer at the top and run the rope through the carabiners as shown. The friction caused by the rope's rubbing on the carabiners will reduce the force that you have to put on the rope when lowering the load down the hill. Don't load the trailer heavier than the load you can physically handle with the rope. My guess is that an average man could easily lower 200 lbs in the trailer down the hill, maybe much more. If you wanted to lower a heavier load, just put 2 wraps of the the rope around the bottom carabiner to give you extra friction so you can lower a bigger load.
Just make sure you use carabiners rated for carrying a load, not a cheap keychain carabiner. You can get carabiners at many outdoors stores or could easily order them from the internet. You could also just use 2 clevis hitches with pins through them instead.
Let us know how you do it and post some pictures!
Hope this helps,
Obed
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The more I think about it the more I'm liking my original idea of fabbing a replacement for my PHD- using the PHD gear box to reduce my tractor's PTO RPM and some sort of vertical pole with a 3 foot diameter horizontal cable takeup spool on the shaft for powering the download/upload pull of a little cable car. Avoids the cost of a winch (and a wench !)- and I can't seem to find a winch with 80 feet of cable that runs on 120 VAC. I will be doing hundreds of trips so hand cranking or carbining will get old quickly. Biggest problem is the PHD only goes in a clockwise direction. I' ve thought of maybe a releasable takeup spool that I could flip over after each down-up trip or maybe just a shaft to the PHD gearbox that is releasably pinned to ease unwinding the spool after each up-down cycle.
Any clever SIMPLE way to get multiple up-down cycles of cable winding off a PHD vertical shaft that will only turn clockwise ?
BTW pictures will be coming this weekend of the 40 degree path down to the river after I've cleared the brush, as right now all you would see is a beautiful picture of brush...
Bob
Any clever SIMPLE way to get multiple up-down cycles of cable winding off a PHD vertical shaft that will only turn clockwise ?
BTW pictures will be coming this weekend of the 40 degree path down to the river after I've cleared the brush, as right now all you would see is a beautiful picture of brush...
Bob
Iplayfarmer
Super Member
In the end the wench will cost much more.
Use some kind of removable spool that can be flipped upside down. I.e. let out the cable with your clockwise rotation. Then flip your spool upside down and the same clockwise rotation will now be pulling cable in.
Obed
Elite Member
Bob,
The answer to going two directions is quite simple. Use your spool like a capstan (capston - wikipedia) which is a common piece of equipment on boats that is used to do EXACTLY what you are wanting to do. When I had a sailboat, I could easily haul a buddy up the mast for doing maintenance. Just wrap a rope (not a cable) around the spool about 3 times and hold the end of the rope in order to keep a small tension on the rope. The friction of the rope wrapped around the spool will hold much more than the weight of your trailer.
When you want to pull the trailer up the hill, just unwrap the rope from the spool and rewrap it around the spool in the opposite direction (i.e. clockwise vs. counter-clockwise as appropriate). I think that you will find you won't even need to do that. You will be able to lower the trailer down the hill by just loosening the tension on the rope some without even needing to turn the spool. Then when you want to pull the trailer up the hill, just rotate the spool.
Also, you won't need a 3' dia spool. Something like a small wheel hub would work fine, maybe even the hub of a wheelbarrow wheel. Note that you will never have more than 2 or 3 wraps of rope around the spool so a small diameter spool will work fine. Look at the picture.
If I need to explain more, feel free to ask.
Obed
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SpringHollow
Elite Member
We sell the gas powered Portable Winch which is a capstan winch. With pulleys, i routinely pull logs that weigh thousands of pounds up hill. Handy things to have. I would use one of their self-locking pulleys as a safety for both lowering and raising. For lowering, if you have the self locking pulley, you could turn the winch off so you do not burn your rope.
Ken
Ken
Here's a progress report on my tool funicula.
First a requested picture of the intended path- about a 40 degree incline 100 feet long. As expected its hard to tell much from this but here it is FWIW.
Second, a picture of the funicula trailer I am building. A few more welds and its ready for the horizontal plywood bed. A miscellaneous note: the "nose" wheel is off a Bensen autogyro my brother and I were building when in highschool.
Lastly, I just bought a huge old PTO winch in the third picture from the Silent Winch and Crane company. If I can figure out how to drive it with either my tractor PTO or with an electrical motor it will be my intended mode of moving the funicula trailer up and down. That would then replace my plan for a redneck winch by substituting a drill pipe "drum" for my auger on my posthole digger as the takeup spool and using my tractor PTO to power it.
I'll keep you posted as I get further along but I've got a bunch going on at present.
Many thanks for your input. If you have any suggestions on using the winch, see my other post "Big ol' winch: HELP !" and please append. Thanks !
Bob
First a requested picture of the intended path- about a 40 degree incline 100 feet long. As expected its hard to tell much from this but here it is FWIW.
Second, a picture of the funicula trailer I am building. A few more welds and its ready for the horizontal plywood bed. A miscellaneous note: the "nose" wheel is off a Bensen autogyro my brother and I were building when in highschool.
Lastly, I just bought a huge old PTO winch in the third picture from the Silent Winch and Crane company. If I can figure out how to drive it with either my tractor PTO or with an electrical motor it will be my intended mode of moving the funicula trailer up and down. That would then replace my plan for a redneck winch by substituting a drill pipe "drum" for my auger on my posthole digger as the takeup spool and using my tractor PTO to power it.
I'll keep you posted as I get further along but I've got a bunch going on at present.
Many thanks for your input. If you have any suggestions on using the winch, see my other post "Big ol' winch: HELP !" and please append. Thanks !
Bob
