Week 8: Finishing up the support bases

The goal of this week was to finish up our support bases. All of my energy this week went into mixing concrete and pouring them into the molds. At this point in time, it finally is beginning to feel as if we finally have something to show for all the work that we have been putting into the project.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Week 15: This is why we don't have public 3D printers.

Image
I have not spent too much time working on our group project this week. At home, I have continued to produce 3D printed parts. At Superway I have been asked to get the shops 3D printers up and running. One of the printers has not been operational since I entered Superway last semester. Since I have assembled two 3D printer kits I have a pretty good understanding of their functionality. To further add to this, I have spent quite a bit of time in Marlin (3D printer firmware) and I am very comfortable editing the source code for different printers. Most of my time at Superway this week has been dedicated to getting this finished. Although this means I am not working on the project it is a much needed break. I have spent all of the last weekend working. Standing during all of my shifts has taken a toll on me and spending some time at Superway sitting down is helping me recover. Thankfully, Angelo has taken the lead with finishing up the curved rail sections. Thursday of this week our team m
Read more

Week 9: Bending 6061 Aluminum

Image
Figuring out how to bend aluminum is proving to be the most stressful part of the project. Looking back, if we had the budget to purchase a series of aluminum that is easier to bend (something like a 3000 or 5000 series aluminum) this aspect would be a lot easier. We chose not to utilize a different series of aluminum due to the high cost of those series of aluminum. On Tuesday, I met with Professor Muntz in hopes of utilizing the school's machine shop to produce new rollers for our ring roller. The idea here was that producing a smaller roller would open up the ring roller and allow us to produce the necessary bends. Muntz instead suggested easier ways to modify our purchased ring roller. His suggestions included grinding away some of the side plate material on the ring roller in hopes of opening up the roller more. Although this worked, the produced rings have a terrible surface finish as the ring roller tears into the aluminum rail. What to do when things go wrong? More researc
Read more