Winch Building Speaker presentation at the 2016 Convention in Greenville

[SF]

Here is one of the speaker presentations planned for the 2016 SSA convention in Greenville SC FEB. 18 - 20. The winch this presentation is based on will be on display in front of the Carolina Soaring booth.

http://ssaconvention.org/

Building & Operating a Winch-What I Would Do Differently if I Did It Again
Ulrich (Uli) Neumann
Five years of winch operation at Carolina Soaring Association: What have we learnt, what would we do different if we had to do it over again, what's in the future?

More than five years ago, the members of CSA embarked on the journey of building a winch. There have been many iterations before the winch was at the state it is today. This paper is a summary of past experiences and what we would do to improve a future winch.

Uli is a Mechanical Engineer working in the field of Wind Energy. He began flying gliders in 1974 in Germany, and did most of his training by winch launch. He became a winch operator in 1976. Uli is responsible for redesigning the drive-train as well as many of the sub-systems on the Carolina Soaring Association winch, which may be displayed at the convention.


SF

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Uli and the rest of the CSA gang (including SF) are a great bunch. They are a wealth of knowledge and have helped my club get our winch operation started. We are assembling our winch this winter and look forward to sharing our experience with you all soon.
If you are attending the convention attend Uli's presentation even if winching isn't your thing...yet...



-Doug

[SF]

The CSA winch which is the subject of Uli's presentation will be on display on the convention floor.

Winch Drum #4 is installed on the winch. The building of this winch drum was depicted in an article in Soaring, making it the most famous winch drum in the country.

It's #4, because the first three put on the winch Broke.

SF

[Stephen Damon]

Which month in soating and year please.

[SF]

The building of Winch Drum #4 should have appeared in Soaring Dec. 2013 or Jan or Feb. 2014.

Send me a private e-mail and I'll send you a .pdf of the proof copy.

After the three failures, the little bit good, Mo Betta, approach was used on #4. We had a stress analysis model to work with, but without knowing what the actual stresses are, the model didn't do us much good. So you take what was done on #3 that almost worked, and just do everything a little bit better. Probably overkill, but no one wanted to build #5, or to have to admit to four failures.

SF