So, long story short: I fell. On start. And pushed the swan neck on my paramotor through the netting. The netting didn’t care, but the tensioner gave up pretty fast.

What’s supposed to look like this – turned into that:

Visuals aside it just didn’t do the designated job anymore, so I just had to fix it.

There’s no way of removing the tensioner from the netting as it’s sewn in but there are two notches on the sides of the outer casing where a flathead screwdriver fits.. and with some persuation the innards of the tensioner pops out.

After wiggling the yellow-ish thing out you can see the inner workings of the tensioner.

For a gadget whose only purpose is to tension – and keep tension on – a wire it’s quite over complicated. There’s a planetary gearbox driving the yellow-ish wire wheel and a separate clicky thing in the center of the black driver that makes sure the tensioner doesn’t loose the tension.

So in the crash one of the planetary gears came loose from the plastic axle on the wire wheel and that was enough to cause the entire thing to seize and jump out of it’s socket.

Removing all the components for inspection, everything looks alright.

Making sure everything snaps into place. Unfortunately due to the metal retainer on the sun gear you cant pre-install the planetary gears on the yellow-ish thing.. so it takes a bit of fiddeling to get everything together. First locate the planetary gears on the sun gear and then snap the yellow-ish thing onto the gears.. making sure to use enough force for them to click into place, but not so much you damage it if it’s still misaligned.

Once it’s all together make sure to get the wire to fit into the little locator hole in the yellow-ish disc, preload it by winding the wire up on the wheel a bit, and then click it all into the retainer.. Make sure that the output-hole on the two parts line up so that the wire isn’t squeezed when fitting it.

In place, like new, keeping the tension on the netting.