Weight fully raised and ready for a drop
Setup
The original inspiration for this whole madness was this steel cylinder, about 7 cm in diameter, 40 cm long, and 10 Kg in weight that was among the junk in my garage when I bought my house. I figured it might come in handy some day, so I didn't throw it out. After my experiments destroying electronics with an ABS-pipe cannon, I figured the next thing to do was to construct something that would allow me to crush things by dropping this heavy weight on them.
Originally, I was figuring on building some sort of track for the weight to slide
down on, so that it could precisely hit its target, but that would have limited
the amount of height I can achieve without building something humongous.
Instead, I devised a precise method of
releasing the weight, so that it would drop exactly on target. To accomlish this,
I made an electromagnet out of an old transformer. By interrupting the current
to it, it allowed the weight to be released from the magnet without any sort of
jerking motion that might cause the weight to not drop exactly straight.
Of course, the weight did cause the tree I used to move
a bit. I got around this by first raising the weight just a few centimeters above
its target, aligning the object to be exactly under the weight, and then cranking it
up to height. That way, I was adjusting the aim with the full weight already on
the tree.
To elevate the weight, I made a hook with a pulley attached to it. This I hooked into a high branch on some overhanging limbs on a tree in my yard. I had to attach several long pieces of wood end to end to reach up to it, and managed to get it high enough that the weight could be raised by 8.5 meters above the ground.
At first, I pulled the weight up by pulling on the string by hand. I had to put on
work gloves to minimize the risk of rope burn, but the thin rope I was using didn't
allow me to get a good grip with the gloves. As I figured accidental droppings might
be dangerous, I decided to build a winch for elevating the weight. I used a mandrel
that was meant for a grind stone. I replaced the pulley with a big wooden one,
and the grind-stone end with a hand crank.
This I then attached to a saw horse, and weighed the saw horse
down with a bucket full of old iron parts to keep it from getting lifted in the air.
Of course, I also needed some sort of 'anvil' to drop the weight on. For this, I bought a 1" think steel plate, which I rested on several small concrete slab on my lawn.
The next step was to invite a bunch of manaical co-workers over for a Barbecue and electronics crushing event. There's just an evil pleasure in crushing small and helpless pieces of obsolete electroncis!
