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Quick "inside stuff" - Bardusch textile towel dispenser

This is an interesting piece of tech that gets a fair amount of usage. I think some everyday industrial objects hide a complex mechanical layer and present it as simplicity.

To understand this piece, think of the single-use paper towel dispensers inside public toilets. This has been raised this to the next level, providing a continuous textile towel - which possibly gets afterwards washed and repaired - guessing around 50 meters in length.
You pull the towel piece facing you, from the top, it allows about 30cm to be drawn out, after ~10 seconds it draws the slack (30 cm) back into the unit.
This has to be experienced in order to understand the mechanical clockwork hiding inside. There are no electronics involved here.

Fortunately, there was a broken unit waiting for repair, complete with refill instructions.







The upper roller supplies the towels. The lower roller is the take-up roller. The green cylinder, spring-loaded, flattens up the take-up so that it's as tightly packed as possible.
The entier clockwork mechanism hides on the right side, a slightly complex arrangements of wheels and a timing / clock-escapement.




Engaging the upper roller, by pulling the towel towards you, cocks the "clock" mechanism and also precharges the spring driving the lower roller. After pulling ~30cm of towel, the top roller locks and can no longer spin, providing only a limited amount of "paper".

The energy used to draw out the towel is somehow transmitted to the bottom roller, similar to how you wind up an alarm clock. After around 10 seconds that energy is slowly released - the bottom roller begins to spin, first slowly, then faster, and then it free-spins after all the towel slack is taken up. This means that there is some friction coupling (clutch mechanism) that only allows a limited amount of tension on the remaining towel. It also means that the bottom wheel is really heavy, so that the initial inertia makes it spin slowly when starting. I assume this helps with a neater roll-up.


Something that looks so simple to use likely hides some mildly complicated mechanism inside, moreso than a plain mechanical alarm clock.

It would be interesting to know how the used rollers are processed up. They frequently have tears - for some reason people get angry in the bathroom - and are not neatly folded.
So there's at least a re-spool machine that takes up a used roller and neatly re-spools it straight or into some usable layout. There would also be an entire process that takes that really long used towel and washes and disinfects it.

What's really unknown (to me) is how they "fix" tears into the towel. Since it's textile, I just assume it's some semi-automatic operation to cut, splice and re-join a length of towel, possibly by some sewing machine. I'm saying semi-automatic since I am not able to spot any manual sewing, the kind I'm used to doing, and I've been using this kind of towels for almost a year now.


It might seem boring, and, while I'm not a really "green" person, appreciate all the effort put into replacing single-use items with reusable alternatives..


Down the YouTube hole we go:







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