All the parts printed out nicely, and we sawed the Delrin rod to the appropriate length and heat-staked the twenty pegs. Something went wrong in the heat-staking process--we weren't sure whether something was wrong with the heat stake machine or with our measurements, but we suspected the heat-staker since we based our dimensions off of careful caliper measurements the T part we originally used to learn how to heat stake. I filed off the worst of the stringy plastic bits, but the model was still less aesthetically appealing than we would have liked. Also, the laser cutter somehow burned our Delrin, so our windlass has an interestingly mottled design.
The first bit of assembly done--one A-frame heat-staked, another on its way!
Holding on to the angled Delrin frame for heat-staking everything proved more difficult than we expected.
The heat-staking was less than perfect, so I filed off some of the worst stringy bits:
The final windlass:
In retrospect: our design worked remarkably well. While the heat-staking did not turn out as prettily as planned (perhaps because of a different Delrin thickness?), the final product was sturdy and easily lifted a 1-L bottle 10 cm above a 12-cm gap. Our only laser cutter issue was the Delrin burning, which added a unique character to our windlass. It was interesting to see the designs of other students--a few looked remarkably similar to some of our discarded brainstorm ideas. Our only design flaw was the aesthetics of heat-staking, which could possibly have been fixed with more precise assembly and perhaps using a few more clamps to hold things together more tightly for assembly; regardless, our windlass was wonderfully functional and pleasingly simplistic.
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