HDD Killers

Hmm, double post today, bet nobody saw this coming. This sort of ties in to the previous entry, but that one was long enough already, so here we are.

This post is about the Captains of Crush Grippers, which were referenced in my second goal for the month. I wrote that I wanted to be able to close the #2 by the 16th April and that it takes 195 pounds of crushing force to close (almost 14 stone, or 88.6 Kg). However it occurs to me that while numbers are all very well and good, they’re a bit divorced from reality. It’s possible to put a number on almost anything to represent some value, but it’s not always easy to conceptualise what that number actually is or what it means in the real world.

Unless you’ve actually attempted to close a #2 gripper, it’s really quite difficult to imagine trying to close something so tough. I mean, you can label it as “hard”, just as you can label it as “195 pounds”, but what does that really mean? You can’t feel it digging into your hand and fingers, you can’t feel the muscles burning or the tendons straining. So how do I get across what it is to close (or attempt to close) such a device?

Well, I guess I can’t really, however I can perhaps give you some idea without involving lots of facts and figures. Through the miracle of a pencil, a piece of paper and a scanner. Oh yes, I drew. First up, we have the badly rendered gripper itself, here’s what they look like … sort of.

I think I could have done the spring a bit better, but it’s a bit late now. You’ll just have to trust me when I tell you it looked better before I started shading. And here we have me giving you an idea of just how tough it is to close the various grippers, I hope you like.

So there you are, a strength index for grippers that applies in the real world.