Editing Clothes elevator (section)

== Pulleys: how does that work? ==
[[File:Logs.jpg|left|thumb|200x200px|Logs which will become pulleys]]
[[File:Marked log.jpg|thumb|200x200px|Log on a spinning lathe, turned round and with widths penciled on]]
[[File:Lathe learning.jpg|left|thumb|200x200px|The lips are too fragile for this beginner]]
[[File:Stack of pulleys.jpg|thumb|301x301px|Eventual progress]]
Like any sincerely amateur hobbyist, I started with the funnest part: pulleys.  Through window shopping I saw that pulleys would add up to at least a hundred bucks, so I decided to buy a wood lathe for 200 instead, and learn how to turn the pulley rollers.<ref>If you're reading for lathe tips, I enjoyed Frank Pain's book "Practical Woodturner".  If you haven't looked into woodturning, its demonstration videos are a genre rich with great content and eccentric narrators.</ref>  I lack a shop at the moment so I "rent" storage under a basement table and awkwardly carry the machine upstairs in its deteriorating styrofoam box.  First world problems, you could say.  But after making the first few into firewood, my pulleys eventually came out okay!

Mechanical engineering is not my thing, which is unfortunate because I enjoy making stuff that is used and should not fall apart.  In my trail of destruction lie bendable garden tools, fallen shelves, and bicycle trailers tipping their loads in the rain and at night.  I once tried to find myself an evening continuing ed. class on engineering, but to my surprise this isn't how it works—nobody wants their city's bridge designed by a punter who picked up their math on odd nights out and a couple of video explainers.

But still, I blame elitism.

For this reason and other factors, it's taken me a few years to build up the courage to try a clothes elevator.  The problem seemed unattainably mathy at first, full of various angles and lengths...  the idea stagnated and each time I sketched it, it came out obviously wrong and incomplete.

The turning point came once it was clear that a fixed pulley simply changes the direction of force, and this direction can be either constrained and dynamic, or constant.  I like constant.

In other words, the rope's travel is equal but opposite as seen from either side of a pulley.  If the pulleys stay put it gets even simpler, and all that's happening in my case is that downwards pulling force on a rope is rotated by 90° at the ceiling, and then another 90° so that it's acting upwards on the load.  This is just the fancy equivalent of a 180° turn over a single pulley [img]! 

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