Wallace you did a great job on this write up . Sorry I have not post
for a long time, I was tired of getting all the porn after my address
was mined out of the archives (I just figured out why some of the
regulars put "DELETE" in their address line, I will see how well it
works)

Again Wallace did such a good job there is not much for me to add. We
have now been operating it each weekend,but due to the treelines we
can only pull 3600' of PLASMA not SPECTRA we went with the more
expensive stuff but I think the SPECTRA will work as well. I thought
we would have done a more accurate comparision of steel vs. Plasma but
no one will pull the steel out anymore. So we have a two drum winch
and we operate it as if it had only one, I can hardly wait for us to
budget the funds to buy rope for the one.
We have not had any launches with strong headwinds in fact there has
been little or no wind at all. The steel launches we made were
700'-900' then the Plasma were 1000'-1200' I wish we could pull out
1500' more rope maybe someday.
There are a couple of note Wallace did not mention.
1. Winch drive cannot read cable tention by observation of the droupe
THERE IS NO DROUPE!!! It looks like the glider is being shot in the
belley by a Purple laser beam.
2. One man can pull extra slack if the strope is too short for a
hookup.
3. No snags or injurys

BTW Dick Kilburn at PSROPE.COM is the salesman that handles our
account, he has been waiting a long time for us to move to our new
gliderport so we could operate the winch. We have about 100 launches
on the rope to date and it shows no sign of wear.
Mark


Well, I was waiting for someone from the Memphis club to post. However,
no one has so far, so I'll have a go.

The Memphis club purchased Glen Lawler's winch a few months ago. My
club, Southern Eagles, used this winch with excellent results for a
couple of years. We only stopped using the winch when we moved to an
airport with crossing runways where we had marginal room for the cable.

A couple of weeks ago, Glen Klingshirn and I had the good fortune to be
invited up to Memphis to train their guys on winch launching. Just as an
aside, I have to say that you won't find a better bunch of folks to fly
with. The hospitality and fellowship was superb. They are also making
the ultimate contribution to the future of soaring in the U.S.: The
Memphis Soaring Society has established their own field at Cherry
Valley, Arkansas. They are doing it right with a huge field, immense
hangar and a beautiful clubhouse under construction.

Anyway, the MSS has equipped one drum on the (two drum) winch with
Spectra. The original wire rope is on the other drum. After a few
launches with the cable, we switched to the Spectra and didn't look
back. The Spectra seems to give higher launches although we didn't do
enough launches with the wire to make a valid comparison. The Spectra
had no more noticeable stretch than the cable so we didn't have any
"bungee" dynamics to work around. To me the biggest, and unexpected,
advantage of the Spectra was that it did not have enough mass to throw
itself into a tangle. During training of new winch drivers, we had a few
incidents which would have put a tangle in wire rope, but with the
Spectra, there was never a tangle of any kind. The Spectra also seemed
to be holding up well through 30 launches or so. The only minor problem
with the Spectra is that it has so little mass that the cable end strop
would fall through the chute unless the winch driver got the power back
on quickly after the glider released. This was just a problem with winch
driver trainees and resolved after each driver got more experience.

It may be that exotic stuff like Spectra is not needed for a winch. The
dacron rope that we have used for auto launch is very similar in
appearance and has almost no stretch like the Spectra. It is also
abrasion resistant. It is not as strong as Spectra but is plenty strong
enough. It may do as well as Spectra on a winch and is cheaper.

Wallace (help stamp out winchophobia) Berry