North Design
Plastic
- Joined
- Apr 19, 2020
I need to have some cast aluminum garage door cable drums machined. I would like to ask the community for advice on the best way to approach this before I post the job for bid in the Manufacturing Resource section. The selected cable drums have a 12 foot cable capacity but I need about 22 feet capacity. I cannot use the larger drums as they will not fit.
My plan is to mate two drums together to increase the cable capacity, to do this I need the following. The left drum would have it's right flange removed and the right drum will have it's left flange removed. The two machined halves will then be mated on a shaft. In order to make sure the wire rope cable runs seamlessly across the joint they both will need to be machined to a common alignment point such as the shaft keyway. In other words, a common location to allow for both the left and right cable grooves, peaks and valleys to mate up and allow the wire rope cable to run seamlessly across the joint.
I will need four machined drums per system, if the prototype turns into a viable product I would order perhaps 20 pieces at a time. So my questions are what is the most cost effective method to achieve this, CNC machining or a different method? Any and all advice is greatly appreciated.
Here is a example photo of the cable drum:
My plan is to mate two drums together to increase the cable capacity, to do this I need the following. The left drum would have it's right flange removed and the right drum will have it's left flange removed. The two machined halves will then be mated on a shaft. In order to make sure the wire rope cable runs seamlessly across the joint they both will need to be machined to a common alignment point such as the shaft keyway. In other words, a common location to allow for both the left and right cable grooves, peaks and valleys to mate up and allow the wire rope cable to run seamlessly across the joint.
I will need four machined drums per system, if the prototype turns into a viable product I would order perhaps 20 pieces at a time. So my questions are what is the most cost effective method to achieve this, CNC machining or a different method? Any and all advice is greatly appreciated.
Here is a example photo of the cable drum:
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