David-Cabezas_SJSU Spartan Superway

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.

Today we were able to present our progress to our project. Both Dr. Furman and Ron was able to provide us with helpful feedback. After, we noticed that the wheels were not aligned. Once adjusting them and determining which wheels were pairs (in total there were four wheels at our disposal and one pair was slightly larger than the other), we placed a metal sheet under the 2x4 blocks so that the handle may slide and not scrape against the board. Lastly, due to lack of welding equipment we used JB weld paste to attach two unistruts back to back. This was done for the fixed and sliding base.