Grooved Drum Article
Grooved Drum Article
The choice
of drum
ost crane manufacturers have moved
over from using smooth winch drums to
ones with some kind of grooving. The
benefit of the grooves is that they help
the rope to wind smoothly and sit on the previous
wrap rather than neatly alongside it. Untidy spooling
is not merely a matter of aesthetics the rope can
get caught, crushed and otherwise damaged and
rope renewal is a costly business.
A helical (spiral) groove on the winch drum,
similar to the thread of a screw, can be used to
guide the rope to sit neatly and avoid the risk of
damage. A problem with the geometry of this
grooving, however, is that when the rope reaches
the end of the drum neatly covering the whole
drum in a single layer the subsequent layers of
rope are not guided to travel back along the drum so
neatly and will naturally sit across the layer beneath.
An end-filler bar can solve this problem but, in
general, helical grooving is not really appropriate for
applications where there are more than two layers
of rope on the drum.
A solution to this age-old problem was designed
in the 1950s by Frank LeBus, an American supplier
of oilfield equipment. In 1937 LeBus patented the
M
Parallel grooving on a winch drum
In the name
Parallel groove drums are often incorrectly
generically called Lebus drums and the grooving
geometry called Lebus grooving. This is incorrect,
since Lebus International, now owned by Franks
TECHNICAL
For ALL
cranes
and
winches