Garage Elevator Emergency Brake Otis Inspired For Attic Lift in Minneapolis

hi this is the elevator that mitch and i built if you want to see how we did it there's a link above just click on the link it'll take you to that video but since then we have got a lot of comments from people about a lot of them about safety most of them were nice comments we appreciate that but a lot of them were about safety so you know at one point we had these fall arresters which worked really well uh but we wanted to take it up a notch and we designed and built this braking system uh modeled after the otis elevator the original otis elevator style braking system so how is it actuated well we want the brake to engage any time there's any loss of tension at all in this rope from the hoists let's start with the bars we call these the jamming bars or the jam bars and what we want them to do is to jam into the rails on the side so let me just show you a little bit of this here we want these bars to come down and jam into the side like that pivoting on this pivot hole right here one on this side and obviously one on the other side too pivoting here and jamming into the side rails okay behind this bar is a ring that looks like this the ring is attached to these bungees right here and anchored on the platform of the carriage it's also attached to the van bars by this cable right here and it's also attached to this cable right here this one right here which is connected to the hoist rope there's a downward force on the ring via these bungees there's an upward force on the ring via this cable attached to the hoist rope so the hoist rope is causing or creating the upward force that is preventing the ring from pulling down on these cables attached to the jamming rods the ring is in equilibrium there's a downward force and is being cancelled by an upward force which is the hoist row if the hoist rope loses tension for any reason that upward force goes away and it allows the downward force the bungees to pull down on the ring which then pulls down on the cable which then actuates the jamming rods on each side when the jamming bars are you can see they press into the soft wood creating a jamming action pivoting right there it basically spreads between the rails seizing the carriage in its place we think that the angle of the jamming bars is crucial if they're too steep they will just bounce off the wood without engaging and if they're too shallow then they won't cause a jamming action we need the jamming bars to grab the wood and then let the weight of the carriage cause the jamming action the bungees do not supply the pressure to create the jamming action the jamming action comes from the bars contacting the wood digging in and jamming let's take note of one other thing the limiters um we knew they'd be important and just for kicks mitch and i tried it uh try to try to put some weight on it without the limiters and they did what we thought they were going to do not to quote denny green um but these bars came down and swung right through so we installed the limiters so that they cannot do that they do have to stop right there and they work perfectly okay what you're looking at here is 300 pounds of sand and the cable has no tension on it what you're looking at here are the jamming rods that are holding the carriage up okay so when mitch and i first built this elevator and we uploaded it to youtube we were really surprised at the popularity all the views that we got and all the i mean just a ton of comments pretty cool really um but i thinking that one of the reasons it was so popular is that we built this without having any special tools we use the kind of tools that most households have around drills and dremels and saws and things like that a bunch of trips to the home depot store we didn't do any welding plasma cutting things like that we don't even have a drill press and we could have farmed out some of the stuff and did this on this particular project but we wanted to keep it sort of the same way that we did the elevator so we didn't use any welding and plasma cutting and stuff like that to create this thing and i think that's important to note um the other thing is be careful when you build this i know a lot of people are building these things i'm really surprised that i'm getting comments from people all really all around the world and they're going up which is kind of fascinating to me but when you're doing it please be careful um be careful when you're building it be careful when you're operating to be safe when you're operating it mitch and i built this we know exactly what it will do we're not concerned about the safety aspects of it at all because we're really careful when we operate it we know what the strength of it is but when you do it do the same thing over build it for strength and be really careful there's pinch points that you know you can get injured with and things like that and just be careful with that we hope you enjoyed this video so like subscribe and leave a comment below

Channel: The Elevator

Views: 11,754

Rating: 4.8947368 out of 5

Keywords: garage, attic, elevator, safety, Elijah, Otis, Brake, Engineering, Project

Id: uKfYjWBLKis

Length: 7min 22sec (442 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 29 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/tuxtanium]

Lumber, unistrut steel tubing, steel plate, aircraft cable, fall arrest lanyards, misc. hardware: $800

120V winch: $200

Trusting the $10 tub of mystery bungee cords to act as a "safety": Priceless

[u/Zve8]

This looks like a nightmare.