This Design proposal was taken to the initial team meeting. It was my proposal to use a gantry crane for the project. I had came across some preliminary design failures and so we had all decided to perfect our crane ideas for another team meeting in which we would select our final design. My main problem for this idea was the weight of the horizontal beam. I had at first selected Steel as my engineering material but knew this would be far to heavy for manual lifting. Also I wanted to make the assembly much easier and quicker to build. These were factors I took away to work on over the passing week.



This was my revised crane design. I had selected Aluminium as the engineering material as it was much lighter than steel but still had the required strength for weights in the design specification. To save more weight I made the horizontal beam a t-section and also had holes punched in the upper most plate. This section of beam has no contribution to the strength and so only added weight. On the design shown the holes are Triangular whereas a more suitable shape would be circular as this would not focus stresses on the corners. The design would be held together using nuts and bolts as it is the strongest and most reliable was of assembling a rig on site.

Below shows the type of t-section I would have integrated into my design.