David-Cabezas_SJSU Spartan Superway

Today, most of the groups presented. Half-scale and small-scale were the only teams that were not able to present today. Both the solar team and the full scale bogey team showed improvement in the range of progress from their last presentation. For next week, our team should further prepare for the presentation. I was able to prepare all of our Solidworks FEA for the presentation. Our safety factors for the third rail support was 18 when it was acting as a cushion to the bogey switching tracks. It was 6.3 when it acted as a vertical support for the third rail, meaning that an additional switch support for the track would not be necessary as the piece will not fail under the force of one bogey. The Bracket had a safety factor of 16, meaning that it will still be able to hold up our track. The team is anticipated to further discuss if a bracket of half an inch may be enough for the support in order to reduce print time and save materials. The straight and dip rails both would not d...

For the meeting on Wednesday, the team continued to work on the track bender. We discussed on the best approach on how we could build the system. There are two possibilities on the final design of the track bender: For the metal rod that's manually turned and used to bend the aluminum bars, we will have both the threaded rods collared onto the metal rod used to build force positioned on top of the board. One threaded rod will actually be positioned below to board. In this case, the pulling force would be more positioned towards the middle of the bending metal rod. Brandon will be bringing drawings of the designs to the next meeting so  that we may present them to Dr. Furman. The following day, the team met with Daniel Brolin at Bojo Tools. Daniel gave us great insight on how to further proceed with the project. He also gave us a tour of the factory and showed us how different manufacturing processes worked. He advised that for our brackets we buy some 4x4 plastic and jus...

For this meeting, we began to design our new track bender. We decided on essentially flipping the system on the side so that it rests on a wooden board. The two wheels will be drilled into the board while there is a cylindrical cut out on top for the handle. The bottle jack itself will be flipped on its side, pushing a grounded board and resting against a movable platform on the bottom. The platform will be resting on top of a 1/4 inch cut out so that it may slide as we increase the force on the bottle jack. I was also in talks with setting up a meeting with Daniel of Bojo Tools and Logan from the small scale bogey team so that we may tour the factory. Daniel said he was willing to continue to help us with our project and to possibly design our parts for injection molding. Patrick and I are still in discussing on how the inductive charging hub will work on the track. I plan on sketching out the station for next meeting.