SAFE Winch Launching

So what are you saying Bill?

That old technology actually works and being brought up to date
does the job people want?

Dave

At 15:39 22 July 2009, bildan wrote:
On Jul 22, 12:30=A0am, Derek Copeland wrote:
At 22:01 21 July 2009, tommytoyz wrote:I see that their main business
is=
making winches and that's why they
charge what they charge. But it doesn't make sense to spend $90,000
on
their cheaper system, not including transportation costs to the US,
when the engine/transmission costs less than $10,000. I mean, $5,000
for a GUILLOTINE ASSEMBLY for over $5,000 on a double drum - come on.

Perhaps the best way to go is buy the bare bones Kit for a "mere"
$44,000 not counting transportation. Any way you slice it, with
Skylaunch, it's not possible to be operational for less than
$60,000,
which would include a lot of sweat equity. I think it's a bit much.
Tom

On the other hand you are paying for expertise, development costs and
a
machine that is known to be safe, to work well and to be easy to
drive.
There is a lot more to a decent winch than just the engine and
gearbox.
How much would you expect to pay for a decent towplane?

There are many homebuilt winches lying around rusting because they
didn't
work well or were just bloody dangerous. Any money spent on them was
wasted.

As Skylaunch import their engines from the US anyway, it would make
sense
to buy them locally rather than shipping them twice across the
Atlantic.

Derek Copeland

It would make still more sense to just look at the "special parts" and
build equivalents in the US. There's no "magic" in the Skylaunch
that
couldn't be replicated here at much lower cost - assuming you'd
acutally want to do that. "You can take the transmission out of the
road vehicle, but you can't take the road vehicle behavior out of the
transmission."

Actually, a different picture is emerging about these old US winches.
Most of them seem to have been taken out of service when they simply
wore out and because aero tow became universally available not because
they didn't work. Then there's the fact that they were built to
launch then current gliders which didn't require so much power.

A recent Gerhlein refurbishment project ended with the overhaul or
replacement of just about everything except the license plate.

On Jul 22, 10:30*am, Dave Martin wrote:
So what are you saying Bill?

That old technology actually works and being brought up to date
does the job people want?


Well, not really. You could say a Model T "works" but you wouldn't
want to take one on a California Freeway. They're good enough to get
started but I really hope to see them quickly replaced with far, far
better equipment.

You have to put the word "works" in quotes since a refurbished
Gerhlein winch only works as well as it did in the '50's - except for
the Plasma Rope which is light years ahead of steel cable. There's a
technology gulf of more than half a century between the technology in
an old Gerhlein and state-of-the-art winches like the Hydrowinch.

These old winches are highly dependent on skilled winch operators and
benign operating conditions. They can still deliver some big
surprises under non-optimum conditions. There are virtually no
safeguards against operator error or really much protection for the
winch operator. Even under optimum conditions, one launch is rarely
like the one before.