Kevin Brasil's Blog

The semester has finally come to an end! Our last set of presentations occurred during these two weeks. This semester has been very productive for the small scale track team. I feel really good about the direction we are headed with our design and the progress we have made. I am grateful that the members of my team are willing to put in a little bit of team over the winter intersession to get our project moving forward. Our goal is to stay ahead of the game to lighten our load for the following semester. Happy Holidays!

My main focus during our rapid prototyping stage was regarding the 3D printing of the hangar brackets. I took on this challenge since I own a 3D printer and always have access to it. Our design requires 60 hanger brackets to be produced. Each hanger bracket takes 6 hours to print with a 0.4 mm nozzle. I decided to step this up to a 0.8 mm nozzle and I was able to cut print time in half! That is 360 hours of 3D printing down to about 180! This process was not as easy as just switching out the nozzles of the printer. A lot of time went into re-calibrating the printer with the new nozzle and dialing in the correct settings on the slicing software. After multiple failed prints I had found the perfect settings. A reduction in print speed, as well as changes to the nozzle diameter, layer height and infill gap settings were all necessary to produce successful prints.

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.

Next week is going to be our first major presentation in the Spartan Superway Project. A lot of information needs to be sorted to make the presentation possible. This week we gained some insight as to how the Futran system works. This gives us a good starting point so that we can begin creating specifications for our railway system.

This week we gave our first lightning talk which can be seen on the group blog post. We discussed some design specifications and gained some insight from the Spartan Superway team after our presentation. This gave us a better understanding of where we are going. Angelo reached out to Kevin Yoshihara who previously worked on the track manufacturing team for some insight. Unfortunately, Kevin Yoshihara is not available to meet with us but he gave us some information on things to watch out for and be prepared for during the manufacturing process. We still do not have the best understanding of the Futran system and are still waiting for more information so that we can begin planning and designing our track.