iwonder wrote:I know it's a little late and all... but one suggestion is to get rid of the vertical piece near the testing wall, it's not really doing much more than keeping the base and the tube separate, right? My boom's have had some pretty weak tension members and I've gotten used to keeping it on the same jig I used to build it until we reach the competition, once we're there I either have the boom laying on it's side or it's on the testing wall and I use the bottom line to space them properly, and once the loading block's on there it doesn't go anywhere. From the looks of your member it might save you .25 or .5 grams
Other than that, it looks really nice! Thanks for the pic.
A picture is, indeed, worth....a lot of words; thanks for providing, George. A nice piece of work!
iwonder is right about the vertical. Helpful in setting up on the wall, but that setup can indeed be done w/o it, and it just adds weight.
Hard to tell- is the tension member square cross-section or a dowel (round)?
Absent the vertical at the wall, the appearance is quite similar to ours. Differences are a 1/4 wide x ~1/32nd thick t-member, in hickory instead of bass, a slightly different treatment at the bolt block, and at the wall end of the tube. At our State tournament we saw a couple variations. The B-team that won was running a setup very similar to ours- machined tube, slightly different wall bolt block setup. Second place (who won regionals) was running rolled tube about the same diameter...low density (square x-section- end grain orientation) blocks at both wall and distal ends that the tube fits in to, bass t-member. Third place C-team was running something very similar to that. Second place C-team was running a larger diameter, rolled tube.
The question I'm not sure of the answer to is how far a tube approach can go, compared to a "conventional" design. Our boom kids were really limited on time this year. Both teams only built one regional and one state boom, and the only test outside of competition was one of the regional booms taken to 12.5kg. The design calculations suggest a B-version in the 2,000 range is possible. We'll see what can be done in the next few weeks....