Design

Work Update: Making Custom Parts

by LAURA SHUMAKER July 20, 2013

Next week, we head to Las Vegas to meet a Raymond Klose of kiloNewton Climbing. He'll help us refine our patterns and make robust versions of the shoes (no more bike tube rands!). So we've been ticking items off of our bill of materials to make sure that we've got everything we'll need to build. There's a snag, however, in that we need to use 3/8" webbing on the shoes, and it's quite difficult to find off-the-shelf ladder-locks and grommets in that size. For now, we're making custom grommets in our shop.

Dan donating some machining time on the grommets. We pay him in chocolate. Grommet in progress. Finished grommet.

While I was gluing rands onto shoes last night, Dan started machining a grommet with the manual mill. Mak's finishing it now so that our prototypes can keep rolling. The adhesive cure time (12 hours) means we have to work fast on tasks in series with the glue-up and then do other things in parallel while the shoes dry. If we stick to schedule, we'll be able to climb test in the next set of protos tomorrow.