Dog Leash for Chain Tension

Excuse my ignorance as I have not yet built my Maslow and I do not own a dog but I was having a Chardonnay inspired moment and wondered if this beastie would be any good for tensioning the chains? https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B076HHBH3J/ref=sspa_dk_detail_4?psc=1&pd_rd_i=B076HHBH3J&pf_rd_m=A3P5ROKL5A1OLE&pf_rd_p=2784349025056798016&pf_rd_r=ZX5ZK396D20MVWQ0Q6E1&pd_rd_wg=kJFu7&pf_rd_s=desktop-dp-sims&pf_rd_t=40701&pd_rd_w=zcNev&pf_rd_i=desktop-dp-sims&pd_rd_r=2dd2f9b0-854c-11e8-a268-9b2d29030f7d

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Ill try it over the next few days

Ive got a dog and a maslow

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I use one of these with our dog. The retract spring isn’t very strong as you don’t want the dog to have to fight it.
I hooked it up to the sled and anchored it in the lower corner and it didn’t do much to overcome the friction of the sled against the surface. It does store a good amount of line though, a similar mechanism with a stronger spring might work better.

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it also is applying the most force when you need it the least, and the least force when you need it the most.

I think that when the sled is at the opposite bottom corner, and the tension on the long chain is the least, hooking these up to the bottom corners will further decrease the tension on the chain and make things worse.

Yip it never worked
Good try
The chain is too heavy and the tension recall is too week
Im now thinking how we can increase the rension like a pull cord for a gasoline lawnmower

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I use these with no problems so far, but appearantly they don’t exist in America.

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Is that off a roller shutter?

Yes, i found the idea in another tread.
I put mine horizontally across the top beam.

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Ill give that a try

Mind that i haven’t cut any large pieces yet, that’s for next saturday, when i hopefully start my arcade cabinet

But if they fail i’m going for counterweights.

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It will be interesting to see the results. I was thinking after the feedback of the dog leads of looking into tool lanyards as I have seen these on production lines where the operator ‘drops’ the tool and it retracts it to a know point to be ‘picked up’ later they tend to be too expensive though. This looks really interesting.

Cool to see @Dag83 added the German style blind roller aka belt winder for tension on top beam configuration. Chains look a little loose for what I would like, but hey if it works!? Q: Do you have a luggage scale weigh device? Wondering if you could roughly measure pulling force somehow…

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I’m not sure how hard i would want it to pull, i can give it a few more turns to tighten it up further.
I’ll try fonding my lugage scale and I’ll try whipping up some gcode for big rectangles and letting it run for a while to see if it gives any trouble.

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ideally you don’t want to have the pull be more than ~3 pounds or you run the
tension on the motor through 0 and backlash kicks in.