A little while ago I posted about my new cloth winding drum. Up until that point a lot of it had been built, but I still didn’t have any of the 1L worm gears needed to drive the turntable ends to the drum. Only the 3D LDraw model showed that it’d work.
Since then, I’ve given in and ordered some via BrickOwl. I finally had the opportunity to test the build out and, unfortunately, it didn’t work as intended. The turntables could easily skip off the worm gears under load – loads which it’s likely to see in operation due to the tension in the warp threads. A little bit of investigation showed that the structures that were holding the worm gears in place were flexing under load. There was nothing to stop the split cross-blocks from rotating a little. Since then I’ve redesigned that section to stop that rotation:
This appears to work perfectly 🙂 . Without risking breaking something, I am unable to cause the worm gears to skip on the turntables.
A few photos of the real cloth drum and its update:
The LDraw model has been updated to include the new support:
http://jander.me.uk/LEGO/resources/Cloth%20Winder.ldr
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