David-Cabezas_SJSU Spartan Superway

We finally began to bend our rails after fine tuning and fixing the issues on the track bender that was mentioned last week. The biggest problem was that the bottle jack was not equidistant in the y-direction, so it would cause lift on the back support. By marking the middle of the support on both the fixed and sliding one, we were able to solve most of our issues. We also added extra support to our wheels so that it could reduce the upwards tilt experienced when bending some of our aluminum.

The last of the unistrut welding was finished to support our wheels on the bender. We were able to actually finish the bender this week, which is extremely good news for our team seeing how we spent the semester perfecting the design. We spent time grinding down and making the unistruts/welding look presentable. The surfaces were smoothed out so that the rotating shaft could slide easily along the unistruts. We began testing by bending one of our rails, however the wheels would tilt upwards and so it caused a slight spiral in the bend. Also the back sliding support would lift up due to the force exerted from the bottlejack, causing the rods to slightly bend. This week is dedicated to fixing these issues and begin to drill all of our holes on the aluminum rails.

This week we were able to finish the rest of the presentations. Maker Faire was unfortunately cancelled and instead Spartan Superway plans on continuing with our own presentations the same weeks to give us a chance to showcase our work and projects. This may have been for the best due to the unforeseen setbacks the team has had to tangle with this semester. Our team was also able to finish all the welding that needed to be done. Our previous design of the track bender was not working as intended, but we expect the new one to work fine. This upcoming week we should be able to finish the track bender and begin testing. All the aluminum rails will be set up to drill and countersink holes in so that we may begin assembly.

Presentations today were cut short since the team had to help move full scale track to the workshop location from the courtyard. We encountered another problem with the bender since the bottlejack is not long enough to extend with our previous dimensions with the bender. Now, we plan on cutting the rods shorter and rethreading one end. Most of the time today was spent on putting together an updated BOM for our project, including the aluminum and screws/nuts needed for the track. This weekend I plan on order all of the aluminum from McMaster carr and the team will get some of the welding done. We are deciding to stick with 6000 series aluminum since the 3000 series was slightly more expensive and they did not have any in stock that fit our dimensions. We also ordered two 0.25" thick 12"x12" sheets of aluminum that will be used for the exit and entry components to our track.

No major updates on the project this week as we continue to put our track bender together. We were able to thread and cut our rods to the right size but unfortunately the die we used at the machine shop gave us threads that were too large. Problem could have come from wear and tear of the die through constant use. To alleviate this we had to rethread our rods manually with no vice with a less than quality die. Along with this, we found out that one of the holes drilled was off just by a couple of centimeters, in which we had to file it to the right size. Both of these issues set us back a day since it took awhile for us to fix the problems. For next week, we plan on looking into the aluminum supplier and to which what series would be appropriate for the project.

Due to unforeseen  setbacks, we were unable to complete the rail bender this week. Still progress made by fastening the fixed base onto the board and were able to drill the holes into the two unistrut pairs. We also attached the L brackets to the 6 vertical unistruts placed on the back. These are there to ensure the sliding base would move linearly along the board. For the upcoming weeks we plan on threading the rods and cutting them to appropriate size.  We were also able to receive the trial order of our 3D printed parts from MakerSpace. Most of our parts were ok, but a couple of them had issues due to the extra filament printed for support. On the third rail bracket, since the slot for the third aluminum rail is narrow, as we tried to clean it out the part began to split. This week I plan on discussing with Wyatt on how we can evade this issue by changing the orientation it it printed.