Anybody know where to find the older style pulleys from TCA pulley systems?

[penguin_2000]

I posted something similar in the trading forum, but I'm wondering if anybody knows where to find the small pulleys from the older style TCA bungee system. The pulley is about 2" diameter plastic and has a metal bracket and swivel. If you have these and want to unload them or know where to find them, please let me know. Thanks.

[SJCFU#2]

You could try a decent hardware store (or even Home Depot).

From what I've seen there is nothing specialized about the blocks in the TCA overhead system - just make sure they are large enough to minimize the bend radius of the cable (I would recommend a sheave diameter at least 16-times greater than the diameter of the cable).

[Robert Smith]

I don't know exactly what the TCA pulleys are like, but I suspect you'll find something to suit here:

http://www.amt-usa.com/s.nl/sc.2/category.6/.f

We have a floor-mounted bungee system, and I spent a fair amount of time looking for suitable pulleys that didn't cost an arm and a leg - plenty of marine pulleys out there, but bejasus are they expensive. These, on the other hand, weren't - in fact, we had a hard time trying to reach their minimum order of $50. In the end, we bought some of these:

http://www.amt-usa.com/s.nl/it.A/id.300/.f ($2.44 each)

and some of these:

http://www.amt-usa.com/s.nl/it.A/id.283/.f ($0.48 each)

and we're still using both. The larger ones needed a little adjustment to stop the cables falling down the sides of the sheaves - I replaced the spacer with a smaller width of washers and re-bent the arms to suit -, but on the whole both kinds have been great.

[penguin_2000]

The (older) TCA pulleys work really well. We have some and are looking for more. They had a metal bracket that was specially formed to prevent wire from falling off the wheel. It also had a swivel which helped to alleviate stress in the system.

I have been to Home Depot, and they don't have pulleys that are good for the overhead reel system. They have metal ones that are either too heavy or too small (and no swivels). They also have these plastic ones that are just about the right size and are designed for use with a clothes line. Unfortunately, the gap between the plastic bracket and the flywheel is too large, and the wire can jump off the wheel and get snagged between the wheel and arm.

Robert... how well do the larger sized pulleys work? Do they ever come apart or anything? They no longer require $50 orders (from what I can tell), so I may buy a few of those.

[campb1pr]

A friend found some 4" plastic clothesline pulleys at Lowe's that had tongues that extended into the groove of the pulley to prevent wires from jumping out. There was still plenty of room for either a 1/4" shock cord, or wire, if you wanted to use it for the inside pulley. The only problem of course is that they are not mountable pulleys. We are going to use them for our overhead installation, and I am currently planning on trying them out at first for both pulleys. We shall see after a few weeks of continuous use. I'm sorry that I don't have a product # or manufacturer to post, or even a picture. I'll try to get him to do so, as they seem to be a good product replacement for what you are looking for.

[swordsen]

Not to belabor the obvious but have you called TCA and asked them?

[penguin_2000]

Originally Posted by swordsen

Not to belabor the obvious but have you called TCA and asked them?

I talked with them, and they don't have the ones with swivels anymore. I believe they had their pulleys custom made... probably had a huge batch made at once, but they switched to swivel-less to save money. Looks like I'm just getting the TCA ones and buying separate swivels at Home Depot. Thanks!

[Joe biebel]

Here are 2 pulleys to consider. p1, has a swivel is 2.5" dia. and can be bought from McMaster-Carr, as part# 3163T21. About $7.00 ea.

The second, p2, I bought from Lowe's hardware and it has no swivel, but is the best pulley I've seen for this purpose. I have swivels in all of the clips on our system, so for me the swivel is redundant. This all plastic pulley is also very quiet. I have scanned the tags that have the manufacturer's info on it (tag1, tag2) so good luck. The price I paid was about $3.00 ea. for these. They are about 3" dia. and extremely light as well.

[Robert Smith]

Originally Posted by penguin_2000

Robert... how well do the larger sized pulleys work? Do they ever come apart or anything? They no longer require $50 orders (from what I can tell), so I may buy a few of those.

The larger pulleys have worked near flawlessly, but I did have to modify a little to suit. They're designed for a heavier cable, and don't have bearings, just a sheave sitting on a pin, so there's some freedom to wobble.

To eliminate the gaps between sheave and mounting, I took out the short tube that separates the arms and replaced with an appropriate number of washers. This meant the arms now met the hub wrong, so I had to re-bend the arms to meet the parallel to the sheave, and to bring the arms close to the rim of the sheave without touching. Sounds like a pain, but it was maybe 15 minutes work for each pulley, and they've been fine ever since. I padded them with strips cut from an old foam camping mattress, held in place with hockey tape, just to stop them scratching the floor. They get around 8 hours of use each week, they've been in use close to three years, and have been pretty much problem free.

But they don't swivel. The smaller pulleys do, and we use them in the same role as the big pulleys. They don't have the freedom to wobble that we found in the big ones, so we're using them unmodified. Their only downside has been that, if whoever's laying out a strip doesn't take the twists out of the cable, there's more tendency for the cable to twist around itself, because of the smaller diameter of the turn. But you're dealing with an overhead system, where the cable doesn't run parallel to itself, and you're not dismantling your system each time, so you likely don't get corkscrewed wires anyway.

As long as you're not using copper cable, I suspect that these smaller pulleys would be well suited for you. We initially used a copper cable over even smaller pulleys - under 1" - and found after several months that the copper strands were stretching, breaking and pushing their way out of the insulation on the individual conductors, and meeting up with strands from other conductors, all inside of the outer sheathing. So the cable would look just fine from the outside, but there'd be breaks and shorts going on inside. Now we're using a stranded steel cable, around 3/8" / 4mm, and a mix of the two pulley types, with no pulley related problems.

[jjefferies]

Sorry to hijack the thread but it reminded me. Does anyone have a diagram of a best or better way to do an overhead pulley system. The primay one I've been around was at Stanford and it tended to have the wires wrap around each other. Might have needed some sort of tension release. And I was never fully aware of the pulleys other than untangling the cited problem.

thanks
Jonathan

[Sboard1019]

Any marine supply store will have pulleys that swivel, in fact most marine pulleys do. I would try there.

[jfarmer]

We have a mixture of the old TCA pulleys with built-in swivels, metal ones without swivels, and plastic ones from TCA. I'm slowly replacing all of them with pulleys from Lowes/Home Depot similar to clothesline pulleys mentioned above.

Our TCA swivel pulleys have always been very stiff in moving. They also have developed an ugly bearing squeal under use.

All of our metal TCA pulleys have a problem in dislodging the bungee cord from the wheel & trapping it between the frame & the wheel. With the newer plastic ones, not so much. This also occasionally happens with the wire, but not as often as with the bungee cord.

As I replace pulleys, I'm going with a plastic sheave pulley and separate swivel. I've already added a swivel & clip to the end of each bungee cord to make maintenance, storage, and setup/teardown easier. I looked at pulleys with better bearings, but the cost went out of sight. cheaper to just replace the pulley every 3 or 4 years.

John Farmer
Coach & Armorer, Oak Ridge Fencers Club

[penguin_2000]

Originally Posted by Joe biebel

Here are 2 pulleys to consider. p1, has a swivel is 2.5" dia. and can be bought from McMaster-Carr, as part# 3163T21. About $7.00 ea.

ARghh... thats what I wanted... somehow I missed your post before I went ahead and bought them straight from TCA w/o the swivels. Thanks though!

[penguin_2000]

Originally Posted by jjefferies

Sorry to hijack the thread but it reminded me. Does anyone have a diagram of a best or better way to do an overhead pulley system. The primay one I've been around was at Stanford and it tended to have the wires wrap around each other. Might have needed some sort of tension release. And I was never fully aware of the pulleys other than untangling the cited problem.

JJ- I don't know if this is the best way nor have I have ever seen Stanford, but this setup has worked for me. Sorry for the attrocious drawing. Let me know if you have questions about it... Basically, the wire is fed thru a pulley and tied up high [read: ceiling] so it doesn't get into the fencers' ways. The slack in the wire is taken up by a bungee, and the bungee runs from 1 fencer's wire to the other... so if both fencers move to the left, the bungee gets shorter for the left person and longer for the right (make sense)? So... the bungee is on pulleys up top so it constantly runs back and forth... during the normal course of a bout, the bungee doesn't really change length that much, it mostly moves back and forth. The pulley at the end of the bungee is also connected to the guide wire so if, for whatever reason, there is too much slack, the whole thing doesn't sit on the ground. The guide wire isn't totally necessary, but it really helps keep things tidy and probably prevents the wires from twisting up too much.

[reawl]

What do you use for the guide wire?
How does the end pulley attach to the guide wire?

[penguin_2000]

Originally Posted by reawl

What do you use for the guide wire?
How does the end pulley attach to the guide wire?

guide wire is a braided steel cable (uncoated). I don't really know how to explain how the pulley is attached to the guide wire... so here is another one of my wonderful pics: