Kevin Brasil's Blog

All of the time working on our design paid off during presentation 2. Presentation 2 gave us an opportunity to showcase our work and receive positive feedback. One of the aspects of our design we have not considered was being able to adjust the angle of our support structure for uneven pavement. This was one of the largest takeaways from this presentation and is something that the twelth scale team will definitely consider going forward.

All of my time during weeks 5-8 has been dedicating to designing components for our track as well as minimizing production time. A modular design is proving to be both an asset as well as an inconvenience. Being able to design a track that is modular will ease assembly and disassembly down the road. The time that we can save doing this is extremely important when our project is showcased at Maker Faire. Unfortunately, being modular also requires a few extra components compared to a non-modular design. One of the biggest hurdles to face is time. Each hangar bracket for this project requires about 105 grams of plastic. Initially the print time estimate was 4.5 to 5 hours. Along with working on designing the track I have been focusing on how to reduce this time substantially. To do this I began investigating into utilizing a large nozzle diameter on the 3D printer. Increase the amount of material that flows through the nozzle would reduce the amount of time of the prints. The key is to fi

Presentation 1 gave us an opportunity to showcase our initial design ideas for our small scale track. A lot of time has gone into considering each aspect of the track design along with each component that will need to be designed. One of our main goals is to create a design that is as modular as possible. Along with modularity the design must focus on ease of assembly and production time.