Last year I worked on a second project for Cotswold Collectibles. The first one was the smaller aerial drone, which they wanted to fit in their lovely cloth backpack, for a Deluxe Midnight Mission Set.

The second one had to do with retrieving lost treasures from a buried tomb in a set called Descent Into Danger. Here are photos shot for the catalog:

My part of the project involved creating a working winch and hook. So I did some research and saw that modern winches have motors attached, so I opted to create a working winch, with ratchet gear, and the winder (which works by hand) winds what looks like a motor, but is actually a crank.

Greg, my friend at Cotswold, wanted it to mount on top of a table-top camera tripod, which is coincidentally perfect for a GI Joe-scaled winch tripod. It tilts, has extending legs, and screws on using a standard mounting screw.

So I designed the base of the winch to hold a nut that would fit that screw tread, so it could be screwed on tightly.

The ratchet works by a springed gear stop (in red) which was printed to be flexible. You turn the motor (the blue piece) and the winch cranks upward, and doesn’t go back down unless you press on the red lever, which frees the winch gear.

I confess I was a little surprised how well it all worked.