Tie Down Ratchet

Two Hundred Ninety Sixth Post: Tie Down Ratchet

I was tying down a dryer yesterday to my truck. I have many tie downs I keep in the backseat, but there was one I had just bought but never used. It has a ratchet buckle to tighten the strap. I set it aside and used the other tie downs. Well I was playing with it this morning without reading the instructions and wound it too many times that it jammed.

How do you fix a ratchet that is jammed? The only way is to completely take it apart. But luckily for me it is the simplest design. It is an amazing design of a turning motion and locking gears. I took out the pin on one side and than the other side. I bent the handle to take it off. All that remains on both sides is a washer, a toothed gear, two bolts that are separated down the middle by the toothed gear, and 2 stops that are spring loaded. Sounds more complicated than it really is but it was easy enough to reassemble after I removed the strap. The only thing that was difficult during the reassembly was bending the handle back so that the locking pin locked each side in.

But the thing to note here is the design. If I had to, I now could reverse engineer the main parts. That is with the exception of the handles. How the handles lock that turn the gear are the main parts of the ratchet. So now it is not just a matter of finding out how to use the tool, but can we find how it works and produce it?

This is a question that is ask by companies reviewing a competitors products, WWII scientist working with German technology, software users, and just about anyone how wants to learn (on a smaller scale of course). So if you acquired some technology from the future, as in many science fiction stories, could you find out how to use it, let alone, reproduce it? This is where all the stuff that makes sci-fi stories interesting factors in. You could study it, but is there any advantage to knowing this information? Should it not be discovered the way it was originally and is its knowledge dangerous? The answers to this question lie in the Star Trek episodes. Well maybe not exact answers, but they present the problem as an idea that is open to thought.

So until you apply your knowledge of Star Trek to what should and should not be reverse engineered... May the Creative Force be with You