Assembly Process

Assembling the components and fixing the design where necessary.

The final concept was used as a reference to start the assembly. The springs, lever, and spool were created and assembled inside a box.
The case was too small to accommodate all the parts. Therefore, we increased the case size.
We then added brake pads. The very tall height however became a concern.
Therefore, we flipped the hard brake system horizontally, since the horizontal width was limited by the spool size anyways. Additionally, with our current hard brake system, the pin would be pulled out more evenly over both springs if the two were oriented horizontally.
We then added the piston system.
We noticed that there was a lot of space on the left-hand side.
Therefore, we moved the hard brake system over to the left side. With this, we were also able to make the static brake pads into a single large brake pad.
We then increased the thickness of the large static brake pad in order to make it fixed and sturdier.
We then added arms to the crank.
We noticed that the arm is free to rotate and move around, which could mess up our weight registration.
Therefore, we added a box to restrict the movement. We realized that the arm still has to move sideways slightly because of the crank movement, so we left some additional space for it to be able to move around slightly.
This was the progress of our model.
We then looked into the hard brake mechanism.
We added a rail system to pull out the block more easily, since there was supposed to be 500 lbs of force pushing against the part to be pulled out. The carriage is the part to be pulled out.
However, we decided that the carriage would be too difficult to pull out by the user since the case itself was already big, and therefore we changed the orientation to be horizontal. During this time, the fillets were removed from the cylinder and piston after deciding that this was a one-time brake and therefore did not need to have a very smooth glide. Removing the fillets allowed the whole hard brake to be attached to two wall of the case, stabilizing it.
We then attached a rope and added a handle to pull out the block.
Next, we modified the bottom arm to have a hole where we will attach the user to the system. Additionally, to reduce the overall weight of the system, we removed the box restricting the arm and instead made a hole on the bottom of the case to pass the arm through. We also added a horizontal bar passing between the hard brake and crank brake, in order to prevent the crank brake spring from moving up being carried by the rope spooling out.
However, we noticed that when the spring is fully compressed (and hence lines up with the fully compressed spring on the hard brake), the spring and spring cups hit the rope guide.
Therefore, we moved the components up.
This was our completed assembly.
There were many modifications made to our original design concept, that only became evident to be necessary after putting the components together and assembling them.