A project in Manila required developing a family of custom hardware to capture and connect various support cables – yet also allow them to shift and swivel to assume the lowest energy vector – to relieve any awkward stresses.
The key design limitation was to meet or exceed the 7000 pound breaking strength of 1/4″ stainless steel wire rope, and to avoid using expensive duplex steels. FEA was used to guide initial design.
Design was solved with an eye towards interchangeable parts, and minimizing the amount of machining. A number of initial ideas were proposed and refined
Through iterative process, the essential functional elements were resolved and consolidated into a minimal design that leveraged a common insert to be used across various size and geometry variants, producing a large family of parts that could be swapped in and out to solve for the specific needs of a local area.
The key to the design is a radiused insert combined with a radiused top plate, allowing the cable to preserve it’s minimum safe bend radius across a large variety of incident angles, while at the same time allowing the entire assembly to swivel to solve for the cable vector.
The hardware was machined by Xometry in China and shipped directly to the site in Manila.
