I've finally worked out how the Hape Crane Lift works. The construction is simple as, but the windings were doing my head in.
The reason I chose to mimic the Hape crane is that it has a single winder for the back and forth movement of the hook. Most of the toy cranes I've seen have one winder for the forward movement and a second for the back movement.
I've managed to learn a thing or two about crane windings from this little escapade. Basically it all has to do with everything being under tension constantly.
Man it feels good to have this made. Now all I have to do is build a proper one for Little Wookie with better winders and a proper rotating tower. The frame could do with some stiffness as well.
All in all, this was a fun project even if it was only a prototype.
Incidentally, Google and YouTube can kiss my fat hairy but. This was all worked out by me because Google and YouTube revealed NOTHING when searching for this. At least it revealed nothing with the search options I gave it. This fundamentally reveals the issues I have with search engines. They are word by word as opposed to sentence and context so basically you will get useless results if you just enter a whole bunch of words. But frankly, I can't be stuffed editing my search to make it easier for Google. Google should actually just build a better search engine rather than rest on its laurels as the default search engine for everyone. And NO, Duck Duck Go is NOT a better search engine. It's only one that doesn't track you.
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