By the time I'd made a sed trip up the mountain hauling approximately three gallons of liquid argon, I was determihat I'd have a cable the mountain before the end of the year. Part of the reason for this is that the current path from the new facility to the cave is quite long. We follow a road back to the city, then follow the winding path up the mountain, which was desigo keep the gradient fairly low. Ultimately, it takes about seven hours to get from the facility to the cave while hauling a rge dewar tainer.

  A slow moving aerial cable lift probably cut that time to less than two hours. There are dowo a cable lift though. As I've said before, maintenance will be a rge endeavor. Though the amount of work to maintain one lift versus multiple won't be linear. If we install even more lifts in other pces, the maintenance burden won't actually be that much higher. The main repair and maintenance would be splig cable that had been damaged, and that shouldn't happen that often, meaning whoever is traio do that will also be able to basically handle multiple lifts around the isnd as part of a single job.

  Likewise, ohe majority of cable is made, we shouldn't actually hat much spare cable, and the damaged parts be re-melted and formed bato undamaged cable as needed. I've already started narrowing down design ideas as well with testing. Ultimately, I want to use a single cable size for all our potential cableways, which means for some of them they might be oversized. That being the case, I started testing ohree main types of cableways I'd want on the isnd.

  The first type is desigo haul a single person along with a moderate load of cargo. It looks something like a ski lift, but with a moderately rge bucket on the back of the bench for holding transported materials. I decided to go with a solid safety bar on the bench as well, to hopefully prevent acts. The sed type is a passenger gondo, with inside seating, meant to transport four people, as well as a handful of personal items that those riding might bring. The third type isn't suspe all, but instead would be pulled along rails withiunnel. Given the much shallower ine involved, and the fact that they aren't suspehese cable cars actually be quite a bit rger while using the same size cable, hopefully facilitating the transport of goods and people through the tunnel if we get to that point.

  I fourty-four days, I've really started to narrow down a lot of the design properties, though I still have some amount of work left to do. Thanks to all the rain, I quickly realized that I'd actually o update our steel processes for this application. Much of our steel items are covered with some kind of prote, whether it's stone, or they're indoors. However, this will be mostly outdoors, and as such, they're proo corrosion. We do, however, have a solution for this and I've already tested it to some success, galvanization.

  We've had access to zinc for a while now, and it's mostly just been stored away. So, what we're doing now is filling a vat with molten zind then dipping our steel that will be exposed to rain in it. For the wires that make our steel cable, each wire is drawn through the molten zinc using a set of rollers that submerge the steel wire uhe zinc as it's slowly pulled through to coat the wiring. Without nickel or , we don't have much of an option to make corrosioant steel, so galvanizing it was our best option.

  I've started a few tests desigo see how corrosioant these new wires are by parison. The testing apparatus periodically sprays a small se of cable with water as the cable tinuously rotates around a pair of pullies exerting for it. Ultimately, it's meant to mimic the ditions the cable will be under long term, while exaggerating the amount of water it's exposed to. Regardless of the results of this test, I don't expeany ges to certain aspects of the system as a whole, so I pn on finalizing the support tower and station desigively soon, so stru of those begin while some of the tests tinue.

  I month, I've started work on various part of the aerial lift from the research facility up the mountain. I'm getting through my leveling requirements for quite a while as part of this, since I o clear a path where the lift will travel up the mountain, so I've been fog on cutting trees during daylight hours. At night, I focus on doing more of the design finalization for the stations and bullwheel for the lift.

  The effort to build this is probably on par with a road. However, unlike a road, a lot of the bor is tralized and doesn't require stoneshaping to effectively make. The support pylons will still mostly be made of stone, but sihey'll be spaced every thousa or so and only stand about sixty feet tall, it won't require quite as much work as filling in a road with stone, even including foundation work. Where as the lifts and wire will all be made at a metalw facility. The lifts will probably be posed of cast parts, and the wire for the cable will be made through extrusion.

  At our metalw area, I've devised a way to feed semi-molten steel into a roller aruder so that we make tinuous lengths of steel wire, which should vastly improve the quality and amount of cable we make. These three day breaks to go grow a mana crystal every month are actually getting to be quite annoying, and I'm still a long ways from being able to ge my work pattern. I could dey them every so often, but doing so would then require that I als oblins with me hauling more liquid argon. Which would lead to more ces to attrawatention.

  Since I'm carrying the rge fsk, I gh the city to stay on roads all the the mountain, while the goblins who help with melting the crystal material take a loour before joining me on the road. If it's just me carrying something odd, most people just tu what I'm doing at this point. I'm spicuous, but I'm always spicuous, so most people have stopped b to try to figure out what I'm up to. Ohe lift is done, I'll easily be able to start spreading my trip time out anyway. Plus, this lets me take a little bit of time to start some of the work up there for the lift as well.

  The station won't actually be right at the cave, si'll be travelling a mostly straight path. Instead, it'll probably be about half of a mile from the cave entrance, meaning we'll at least need a det trail betweewo locations. So, while the goblins who are helping me melt material sleep, I've been mapping out a path to where I want the station, and have started on some of the tree cutting up there as well.

  I ran into a few more issues that I had to solve as I worked on the design for the aerial lift system in this st month between crystal growth sessions. First, as I did load testing on my smaller rig, I realized that I actually need some kind of tensioning system to bahe load on the cable tinuously. Thankfully, a little bit of meical work was able to solve this issue, though it's going to be a bit trickier to ha with the rge system.

  All I o do was install a pulley along the line on a rail with a terweight to keep stant tension on the line. Though there were a few problems that I o intermediately solve for that. First, I quickly realized that I he pulley wheel to be rge. Our cable is about two inches across, and I found that a wheel about ni across was necessary to not cause damage to the cable. My test system is also quite small at about 300 feet. In parison, the length of the full system will be about five miles long, and the tension in the cable will increase with that total length ara load.

  Meaning that not only will my terweight o be much bigger, but it'll also o have a huge pit dug u so that it travel that extra distao make up for the svolved in managing such a long cable. Whifortunately means I'm going to have to get a stru team involved. The good news should be that most of that stone from excavation should find use in the support pylons along the way down the mountain.