Week of November 8

This week team Applesauce saw some of the most dynamic changes in it's game plan since we decided on a concept way back when. Most of this arose from the realizations that several of our MCM's most critical actions were in deep confliction with the layout of the module at the time. MS7 requires us to manufacture 3 of the parts of our MCM by next Friday, so we had to resolve the engineering of the module as soon as possible.

OLD DESIGN:



















NOT GONNA WORK.

The main change we made was to remove the top and sides of the body. All they seemed to do was get in the way of the internal parts and require us to perform a lot of excess machining. By Occam's Razor, the only reasonable procedure was to do away with them. Especially since the only function of the body was to be shaped in such a way that it would repel thrown ping pong balls, which doesn't seem to be something that other teams plan to do.

There were major misalignments between all the internal components of the MCM, mainly involving the location of the motor with respect to the back axle. To remedy this, we added a wooden mount for the motor that raises it up a quarter of an inch and we also moved the position of the metal rods toward the front of the machine in such a way that the moment about the front wheels will still be balanced.

NEW DESIGN:

















GONNA WORK.

We are still having trouble figuring out exactly how to couple everything together: The motor to the gears, the gears to the axle, the axle to the wheels, etc. We also aren't sure if the way that our other modules are designed is going to require us to alter the design of our MCM, but we think that we have enough info to go ahead and manufacture these three parts:

The main part of the MCM:















The sides will be bent up to hold the axles.

This is the block the motor will sit on:















And these are the two rods that the other modules will eventually connect to:















Yes, we chose to manufacture this because it is extremely easy. You can't blame us.

Next week will be devoted to the final exam, manufacturing our first three parts and hopefully finishing most of the engineering for all modules. More to come on that next week!