Week of November 22

This week the team completed all of the engineering including the solid model and CAD drawings. Upon completing all of our drawings, the team able to go into the shop well prepared to machine all of the parts of our most critical module.

The team spent six hours on Tuesday creating the axles with grooves, motor couplings, and drilling holes into the gears for set screws. However, after cutting the grooves on the back axle, we discovered that the newly purchased wheels were too large compared to the supplied wheels in the kit and therefore, the grooves made for the e-clips were not placed correctly. Instead of recreating the back axle, we decided to simply cutting away at part of the wheel using a lathe on Wednesday.

On Wednesday, the team milled the motor couplings and the back axle as well as threaded all of the holes in the gears and motor couplings. Then, we used the waterjet to create our final piece of our most critical module, the plate, which holds the two rods to the body permitting vertical motion to the joint. After all of this machining, we assembled the most critical module and tested our motor using the provided DC power supply and presented it to our GSI for MS 8.

Here is a picture of our completed MCM:













Our MCM on top of the arena:














This week the team plans to machine the arm and joint, our other two modules. We will create the joint out of acrylic using the laser cutter and the arm using PVC pipe which will be cut using the bandsaw. We hope to have all of these parts machined by Wednesday and put together by the end of this week allowing us plenty of time to thoroughly test and refine our machine before the big competition.