Week 4

Today is the second day of week 4. We just had thanksgiving break and our MS9 is due next week Monday. We just started building the car. We cut out the base with 1/4" acrylic plate, and cut out the ball clamp with 1/8" hardboard by using the laser cutter. We cut out two ball clamp so we can attach them together to make a 1/4" thickness. We cut out the aluminum rod for motor shafts and wheel shafts by using band-saw. We also used the band-saw to cut out the aluminum L-block for the bushing mounts. We used the mill to drill holes.

Our next step for the car module, we need to finish the mechanism for our double gear motor-box and cut out the clamp support. We need to sandpaper the shafts so it could rotate smoothly inside the bushings.

We have not started building the flipper module yet, but we hope to finish it by this week. We need to water-jet the base and the flipper support. We need to mill the L-blocks, attach the rack to the arm. We also need to assemble the planetary motorbox.

We may make modifications as we manufacture the two modules.





Our MCM moved last week! And we got a good grade on MS8.

The Real MCM:

The Solidwork Drawing:

One important note: we had to remove the bushing that we were using as linear bearings. No matter how much we tried to sandpaper the rods or even use lubricant the arm fixture would not slide up the rails. We now have 1/4'' rods sitting in 3/8'' holes. This is not ideal because it allows for a lot of rotation and could lead to jamming. It worked last week however and at this point there's really nothing we can do.