Spartan Speedway Individual 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.

This week, we continued with the presentations and were finally able to give ours. I feel that it went pretty well and we were able to appropriately answer the questions and concerns that were expressed. We also spent this past Tuesday working on our rail bender. I feel that it is really starting to come along but it is rather tedious while trying to make exact measurements by hand to allow for as much accuracy in our bends as possible.I personally have high hopes for the rail bender and am excited to work on it next week.

This week was presentation week. Unfortunately we weren't able to present this week but we will next week. It is always nice to hear about the other group's projects and to see how everything is coming along. I personally feel like we ourselves are following a decent direction and our project is slowly coming along. We should have the rail bender built fairly soon and I hope it meets our expectations. From there, it will just be a matter of bending rails, assembling and if time permits, being more creative with out track. Ideally the team will have access to E123 by next week to take care of some in-house manufacturing but again, it will be a matter of availability.