I started some testing on just the first pulley and lots of things went wrong:

Twice I had to increase the pulley size because I wasn't able to use enough line winding onto said pulley for my total line draw need after accounting for the 32:1 downgear ratio. I calculated 27" as the very least it has to winch in at the motor shaft to get 0.84" total draw at the joint of the index finger which is perfect (27/32=.84). The pulleys were too small to accommodate 27" winched onto them so I had to increase the size - which meant removing everything, increasing size, then rewinding everything by hand for an hour plus! Just so tedious and annoying!

Another failure was one time, the string was too loose on a pulley and a tighter wrap got under the looser wraps and then the looser ones snugged against it binding it down like someone said would happen - which made it all stuck. Also I had many derailments where the string came off the pulleys and started wrapping up on the axle off all the pulleys and getting things quite stuck that way. I've been dealing with carefully untangling and rewinding tangled messes over and over. It's been a disaster. I thought of scrapping the whole thing a couple times.

However, after taking a step back, it occurred to me that the tangling issues were largely due to forgetting to put the final outlet of the system under load to tension the whole system which would keep every pulley winding nice and tight and aligned well. So this was user error and oversight, not the fault of the basic concept of the system then. I just forgot to do those parts in my rush to start testing things. I planned to only add that stuff at the very end once the whole system was done and did not think I needed to do that just to start initial testing on a single pulley. That was a faulty assumption and an oversight. The whole system always has to be under tension to work right. My bad. Lesson learned and a valuable one at that. I did not fully grasp until I saw with my own eyes the disasters the importance of keeping it all under tension at all times. Yes I knew theoretically it was needed eventually, but I did not realize the whole thing was absolutely doomed instantly every time if it is not immediately under tension even for a first set of simple tests. That was revelatory for me.

I'm glad I got to see the failures first hand though because it enabled me to study what failures can be expected when tension is not placed and know intimately first hand the importance of tension and how lack of tension causes the failures specifically. Valuable to see it with my own eyes instead of only imagining it. This has helped me come up with some cool derailment prevention and loss of tension prevention mechanisms to fool proof my system more - even beyond the tension spring drawing shown in my last post.

Note: At the top of the motor output shaft, you can see two large pulleys where I have wound 2 pulleys for moving the motor axle clockwise and counter clockwise to simulate the motor moving. These are temporary windings just for testing manually without messing with electronics for now. These need to be fed in under tension at their inlet and their inlet needs to have a eye positioned in front of it that forces the string to stay in line and not feed in astray out of alignment. So also the pulleys for the main motor output shaft pulley for flexion I'm testing and the first pulley downgear I'm testing. Every place a string enters a pulley needs to have a small eye that guides the string onto the pulley perfectly in alignment with the plastic discs of the pulley and prevents it from derailing.

I noticed that when feeding string into a pulley I intuitively hold the string between thumb and index finger and pull the string away from the pulley as its being fed into the pulley to apply tension on the line and tight wraps on the pulley. I also align the string with the center of the pulley and hold my fingers at a minimal distance away but not too close. You want the string to be able to easily angle up and down from your finger pinch point to ride up and down the height of the pulley creating layers of wraps evenly as opposed to all wrapping in one area and not having a well distributed wrapping. If you study how to wind a bobbin on the top of a sewing machine, you see the string take 3 turns and go through a metal wheel that places tension onto it and only then does it enter the bobbin which it then winches onto the bobbin rapidly to wrap up the bobbin with string. These are all designed to create tension from the otherwise loose and floppy string leaving the main spool of thread you are feeding into your empty bobbin. I need to create a similar type of tension system to feed onto my pulleys which are acting just like that bobbin and need the same type of setup to succeed.

To create the eye that centers the string and forces it to neatly stay on the bobbin and not derail so easily, I plan to use 28 ga tinned copper bus wire. I will cut out a small section of that wire and glue it to the base platform the thumb tacks are glued to and then run it vertically and then form the eye shape that acts as a guide and derailment preventer. The eye will just be a oval with a couple legs glued down with 401 glue to hold that oval into position.

For the tension maker, I'm planning to use just a couple windings of tension spring with two small square pieces of plastic which will sandwich together and be pinched together snugly by the tension spring and the fishing line will be fed through this. I will use the same produce container plastic I'm using for the pulley discs. The fishing line will not be abraded/damaged by this in theory but only some pinching force applied to it to give it some tension and cause its feeding action of winching onto the pulley to be tight and snug to help prevent derailments and tangles and loose wraps. This system is meant to emulate and replace holding the string snugly between thumb and index finger as it's fed into the pulley tightly.

Note: I'm not surprised I'm having these issues. The system was not under tension with the spring tension system I posted in my last post yet so that's largely why this is all happening. These measures are mainly resolving issues caused by that lack. However, by adding these problem preventers into the system, I make the system more redundantly protected from any issues coming up in the future. It's like backup systems for problem prevention here.

Note: thinking back to the tremendous struggles and trial and error I watched the engineer on the YouTube channel "StuffMadeHere" has been an encouragement to me in this struggle. His videos never really have just perfect flawless success the first test run. There is always problems and tons of trial and error tweaking to resolve each issue and creatively work around it until he ends up with these beautiful and elegant solutions in the end that work great. This seems par for the course so I just have to remember that this type of headache phase is typical.

Note: it is VERY tedious to have to untangle messes I've made due to lack of tension and proper guidance etc for the string windings. We have 5 total windings each around 3 feet long and all within a envelope close to the area of my thumbnail. It's all compact and tedious and little precision needle nose tweezers or the tip of a sewing needle is the only stuff small enough to even get in there to grab anything. Just a overwhelming mess to fix issues. Not for the faint of heart. If I did not believe this has strong potential I'd give up but everything so far isn't proving lack of merit but moreso is user error and not having a good setup going yet. But even that is a good thing as studying the error and causes of error is giving me great insight into what needs to be done to prevent future error and make the system reliable. I need this first hand education to preempt future errors.