eStop Tripod Legs

While at ArrowES I did a lot of machining and plasma cutting. We had a CNC mill and a CNC plasma cutter, so I designed a lot parts to take advantage of these computerized machine tools.

One of these products was this tripod leg design. The existing eStop tripod had two flaws, it wasn’t quite rigid as it had a few bolted connections making up the legs, and the mount point where the traffic light would slot into the tripod was quite high. As the traffic light weighs a bit and that weight is at the top, it is difficult for shorter operators to mount the light to the tripod.

This new revision was designed to be more rigid, have a lower mount point, be quicker to deploy and easier to manufacture. To deploy the leg you slide spring loaded bolt, quite like the bolt on a machine gun. The legs can ratched down, but can’t ratched up, have multiple height settings, and when it was erected with the designed tolerances, and the bolt axis that the leg rotates upon going through two holes on each side of the RHS steel, it was quite solid.

Prototype of the legs for mounting a crew-served oscilloscope

One part I particularly enjoyed was designing components specifically for CNC manufacture. Rather than treating the mill or plasma cutter like a manual tool that just follows drawings, I designed parts around repeatable operations. This included making jigs that could hold multiple parts at once and using pattern operations so the program would machine several identical features in a single run. The operator only needed to swap parts in and out, tighten the jig, and press start again.

It made production far more consistent and productive compared to doing lots of individual manual operations, and it meant the accuracy of the finished parts depended mostly on the setup rather than the person running the machine.