David-Cabezas_SJSU Spartan Superway

After extensively working all of last week, the weekend, and the few days before the meeting, we are almost finished with the track assembly. Most of our aluminum rails have been bent with the track bender now working as intended. Thursday we plan on finishing the switch sections before presentations on Monday. Some problems we ran into were leveling the track and curves that were too long and therefore needed to be cut down. Some spaces of the track still need adjustment since the bogey does get caught between a wedge or a gap between the switch sections. Most of these issues will be fixed in the coming week when we fine-tune our track for the Spartan Superway exhibition on May 18.

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.