On Friday, February 6, 2015 at 1:12:01 PM UTC-5, kirk.stant wrote:
Our club (in the US) is looking at a Pawnee that has the Tost cable retractor winch system and we are curious about it's operation.


Skyline Soaring has been using an internal Tost reel in its Pawnee for years. (Full disclosu I am NOT a towpilot, but a CFI(G)) It is fitted BEHIND the pilot. We DO use the factory supplied weak link/slug at the glider end, and depend on the guillotine on the towplane in lieu of a weak link there. The weak link is selected to serve all our Tost-equipped gliders, for the Schweizers we use a poly add-on (about 3' long).

There are many appropriate procedures, but we chose to pull out about 30' of cable and hook up the glider and then with the glider wheelbrake set unreel the cable by the towplane taxiing out. (The towpilot not only watches the wingrunner for signals, but can actually hear/feel when the retainer ball on the cable inside the fuselage rattles down the tubing and lodges in the receiver.)

Retracting is done on descent, which should not be too fast or the wind drag will trigger the tension-based cutoff switch on the reel (when it's fully retracted, that tension switch cuts off the motor.

The cables should be replaced after 1,000 launches; we run through about that many every year. It's not cheap, so we buy it in 300 meter rolls and cut it up ourselves.

The Tost cable is not spliceable, like poly, but we've not had problems with breaks. We DO get occasional breaks right at the glider end (curiously we've NEVER popped the weak link!), but just cut off the frayed end and re-attach the slug, shortening the cable by 5' each time.

Also, OUR club members didn't like the short cable length that comes standard with the reel, so we opted for an oversize reel so we could use ca. 200' of cable.

We find that it REALLY speeds up launch operations and eliminates the challenge of making high approaches (so as to not snag a powerline just off the threshold) and then finding the dropped cable in the grass.

Now . .. if we could just get the same system installed in our Husky . . .