Pipe Runner

After Building a light box to take better photos out of PVC Pipe, I had a Bit of excess pipe laying around so I got to thinking, What if I could build something that could move along over a pipe with ease.

So that is when I got to thinking, I needed 8 wheels, 4 on each side so that it has enough traction to move along the pipe under a heavy load. After I had built the prototype I figured out that it was going to be difficult to power all of the wheels with just one motor.

At first I tried chains but found out that wouldn’t be strong enough, and would be very easy to do in the first place. This is mostly because the wheels on each half turn different directions.

To be able to get them to turn like this I was lucky enough that the distance was perfect so I could use the right amount of gears. To turn the wheels different directions as shown above. From what I had to work with I came up with this design:

When I was done getting the Moving part of things done, I worked on the lifting mechanism. After several attempts to get the perfect ratio on the gears from the motor to the drum where the string is wound onto I moved onto the pulley system.

After Building and testing Pipe Runner on the small Test piece of pipe I had and deciding that it would work good enough, I decided that I would then go ahead and build the pipe structure to be able to run on. I started simple, but then realized that I needed somthing more stable so i added more pipe to sections to make it stronger.

Due to the strength of the PVC pipe Pipe Runner is only able to lift about 5 Pounds. That is my only disappointment with it. If I ever decide to make another one similar I will either use metal pipe or enforce the current one. Other than the pipe not holding very much I believe that Pipe Runner Works very well and I like how it turned out.

I used the Mindsensors.com Sony Playstation 2 Controller interface to control it in the video. Programming anything to be extreamly accurate with string is very hard due to the string winding up on the spool different ways every time. Using the PS2 Sensor makes hooking very simple and easy.

Please feel free to post any questions, comments, improvements or if you need help with the Pipe Crawler at the Forum. Click Below: