Spartan Speedway Individual Blog

Today was the day for the second presentation of each group. The time permitted most of the groups to go but ours and the full-scale guideway will be going next week. It was nice to see the progress each group has made since the last project and how everything is gradually coming together. I look forward to what improvements are made for the next presentation.

This week's meeting started off with meeting with our project teams. It seems that the CAD for the piece we will be attempting to try injection modeling on is about finished, which is good. We briefly discussed the direction we will take for the rail bender and the improvements of the track. After that, we returned to campus to listen to Dr. Furman's presentation on mobile technology. 

Nothing particularly different happened this week. We first listened to a presentation on facial recognition technology and how it could be applied to the Superway. Honestly speaking, all the technical details were a little beyond my current comprehension. We discussed some adjustments that could be made to the T/Y junction to alleviate some of the current design issues. I also practiced with the rail bender for a little while and it proved rather difficult. As such, we are looking into some improvements for the setup.

This week, the small scale team further discussed the development of the project. As the small scale guideway team, we set up our priorities with what we were gonna work on first specifically. We are thinking about widening the brackets in order to only use one opposed to two. Also considering the use of a bracket along the curved sections to help with sections that ended up too wide due to bending errors. We also discussed the use of a joining plate to connect and line up the two rails and therefore would also need an indent in the brackets to accommodate them. Still discussing the idea of injection molding and are leaning towards having the brackets done this way to be more efficient.