Clothes elevator

I was surprised to find that my Berlin apartment doesn't have enough space for an electric clothes dryer, nor a two-car garage with tool storage and a billiard table. What is expected instead is that I take up half of the living room with a drying rack which folds only to mock me when I unfold it again minutes or hours later.

Winter makes this arrangement especially challenging, since wet clothes left in the cold will immediately grow mildew, heating a room is expensive, the windows are drafty... and did I mention that winter is long and cold, to be endured best behind a protective shield of fidgety little indoor projects.

Mechanical engineering is not my thing, which is unfortunate because I enjoy making stuff that should ideally hold together mechanically. I make garden tools that bend, shelves that fall out of the wall, bicycle trailers that tip their load in the dark and rain. I once tried to find a night class on the subject. Surprisingly, this is not how it works—it seems that nobody wants to hear that their city's bridge was designed by someone who picked it up on odd nights and from a couple of nice video explainers. I still blame elitism.

Because of these known weaknesses and other factors, it's taken me a few years to work up the courage to attempt this elevator. The problem seemed harder than it is, at first: so many different angles and lengths to consider... the idea stagnated and my drawings never progressed. The turning point was when I realized that pulleys can simply change the direction of force, and this direction can be constrained to never change. In other words, a set of 8 directional pulleys can turn the lifting force of four ropes going to each corner of a frame by 90 degrees, and then by another 90 degrees so that pulling down lifts the frame up. This is just a fancy version of a single pulley in the ceiling turning the force by 180 degrees. The other very happy discovery was that the displacement of each rope is unaffected by the angle the rope is pointing, in other words pulling the four ropes together will cause each corner to be lifted by the same amount, regardless of how the ropes are routed around the ceiling.

Pricing pulleys, I saw that they would add up to at least 100 bucks for the crappiest possible wheels, so I decided to buy a wood lathe for 200 bucks and learn how to turn my own pulleys. First world problems, you could say that again. But my pulleys came out alright!

A year or two passes. But one crappy afternoon I stumbled across this gem—a huge oak bed perhaps tossed out of someone's window after a particularly nasty breakup! Having spent a bit of time on the streets, I recognized this for the incredibly attractive nuisance it is and I rushed home to get some tools. Indeed, by the time I returned I'd found that scavengers had apparently chewed on a dozen of the sticks and had torn them out to... I really can't imagine, maybe for firewood? ski poles for a baby? So I unscrewed whatever was left, tossed it in my innocuous stroller and walked back home playing it off as if I were not carrying a heap of fool's gold.

The wood was perfect. Don't forget to sand everything smooth before putting it all together. I forgot and it got awkward to work on, assembled at 2.5m x 1m. In my case, some aluminum angle and pop rivets served admirably and keep the overall weight down.

Mounting the pulleys had me stumped for a while, see this outrageous scrap plywood monstrosity. It's cute that the pulley has become invisible, but there is nothing else cute about what's happening here.

Bending some metal strapping is fine and lets me bolt directly into the ceiling with whatever will be most appropriate.

By another stroke of luck, I found that the bathroom ceiling had a few metal studs which can be trusted to give hints before catastrophic failure, unlike bolting into ancient concrete and plaster as I've found everywhere else in the apartment. And even luckier, a strange little access door provided extra metal to anchor too, and happens to be directly above a reasonable spot to mount the action bits. If you don't have a little door like this, it worked so well that I would recommend making one—and you might also attract a family of Borrowers.

This rack turns out to hold 3x or so loads of laundry, and especially when it's suspended above your head it feels important to mention that the clothes will be heavier than you might expect. A 5:1 block and tackle system was easy to make using two pairs of double pulleys, which I purchased like a normal person from the 21st century since I wanted them to be really smooth and unlikely to explode.