At the 2004 chunk the main stanchions for the torsion frames were bent by the impact of the arms. You can see the animation of when this happened on the Mista Ballista Arms page.

We discussed many possibilities, and it was decided that we could leave the stanchions bent (which gave us more room for arms) and just reinforce them.

We had to fully disassemble the machine to accomplish this.

First things first, we had to remove some welds we had made that held the epizygii in place. We could then remove the epizygii and pull the rope out.

Once things were removed from one side, the entire rope bundle could be extracted out the back side.

Next up, remove the engine frame from the trailer. Dave got to use his forklift with exciting effect to manage this maneuver. The bundles are certainly on the edge of the forklift's capacity.

This picture shows quite clearly the amount of bending the stanchions have gone through.

Once it was down, it was time to start cutting, fitting, and welding steel plates onto all four of the bent stanchions. We had found several pieces of 1/2" steel plate that were just the right size to be split and added over the bent stanchion. This process took several weeks. (We meet once a week Thursday evening.)

Each time one side was partially welded or painted, Dave brought out the forklift and flipped the frame over to access the other side.

Eventually, all the welding was complete, and we even got the frame painted up. Huzzah!

Dave had purchased two new 600ft spools of 1" nylon rope to replace the yellow poly-propylene.

Eric greases up the modiolus in preparation for rewinding the bundle.

Roger and Eric lay the first layer of rope in without pulling the entire spool through. Each strand we pull through and make as tight as possible.

To speed up winding, the massive spool is layered up, and tied together so we only need to pull 120ft through at a time, instead of 500 ft.

We continue on deep into the night, filling up the bundle until there was no room left. We managed to stuff about 500ft of rope in. See the 2005 Punkin Chunk for more on how these bundles performed.