February 20, 2019 Weekly Blog

This week we re assembled one of each section of the original track including a switch, a curve and a straight section. We also finalized the design for the new rail bender. I believe that the design should work and will be more stable than the original. In preparation for next week, I was tasked to see if any of the campus machine shops would have the capability to thread a rod. I will probably be visiting an ME41 class sometime soon and if that proves to be unsuccessful, will look into the E123 machine shop. Otherwise, if neither have the capabilities, will would probably look elsewhere or just end up purchasing what we need. 

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March 20, 2019 Weekly Blog

This week we continued working on building our rail bender. Unfortunately we weren't able to meet yesterday which will slightly delay our completion but it should be alright. We reattached the wheels today and I hope that they are well placed and the rail will be perpendicular from the applied force as is ideal. We also fastened the fixed base but on slight concern is that the back end is a small distance off-centered which will hopefully not affect the results. Lastly, we applied the L brackets to the support pieces in the back of our design but one concern with those is if the unistrut will create a uniform flat surface to slide against as most of the cuts were slightly angled due to manual cutting.We also received samples of our printed parts next week. I am not totally sure what we should do about the cleaning of the third rail bracket piece but we will figure it out eventually.
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April 28, 2019 Weekly Blog

Over this past week, we have been welding the last few pieces of unistrut that would support the wheels that the rails would roll along. We spent a good amount of time grinding down the welds and trying to make things look as presentable as possible and to smooth the surface out so the rotating shaft can slide along the supports. Upon completion of the welds and the grinding, we completed the assembly of the rail bender. Everything was working as planned until we tested it on one of our rails. Although the rail turned out as we had liked, the processing of bending it wasn't as we had hoped. The wheels would tilt upwards so the rail would begin to have a small spiral and the sliding base would begin to life, causing the threaded rods to bend. We determined that this was all due to the bottle jack not applying its force on the sliding base equidistant from the to threaded rods resulting in a moment. We will spend this week trying to figure out the best approach for a solution to this...
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May 8, 2019 Weekly Blog

This week we began using our track bender to bend the actual curves for the track. It was a slow and steady process but the rails seem to come out better than they did last year. We are slowly putting the track together and plan to have the four switch sections completed by the presentations on Friday. Looking ahead at next week, we will prioritize the adjustments on the track to allow for optimal traversing of the bogie. Some curves may be a little bit too long and may need to be cut. Other things include leveling the track a little better, filing down some of the uneven rails and such. If time permits, we will attempt to implement the entry and exit rails but if not, we will at least have it cut for next year to implement if they so please. 
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