Week 2: Continuing Machining

This week we started to machine the rest of our body and most critical module.  We spent a cumulative amount of approximately 10 hours in the ME machine shop this week.  We mostly worked on cutting the sheet metal for our body as well as cutting, milling, and drilling our brackets in order to assemble our robot.  The parts we accomplished were all the cutting and milling for our most critical module, cutting all the pieces for the body that were to be cut in the ME shop, and starting to work on the brackets for assembly.

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Bracket: machined with band saw,
mill, drill press, and tap.


                  Bottom Bar: machined with
                  band saw, mill, and welded.

                  Used slot cutter on mill in

                  order to get slot on both sides

              of bar.                             _________________________________________________________________________________

Our goals for next week are to finish all the pieces for the body.  This will include going to use the water jet on Tuesday from 8:30 to 10:30am. The pieces we will cut include the sides of our body, the base, and one of the upper bed pieces.  The reason we chose to do these on the water jet was because the base and upper bed piece have cut outs in the center of the pieces that will come out more accurately and easily on the water jet. We are also cutting the side pieces on the water jet because of the hard angles and hole placements that we have for these parts.
Our other main goal for next week is to completely finish our most critical module by wednesday for MS8 and finish drilling and milling all of our brackets.  We would like to start assembling our robot on Friday.

We have made a lot of progress this week and hope to keep up this pace for the rest of the semester.  Our ideal schedule would be to finish everything in the machine shop this week and use the following two weeks to work on assembling our body, most critical module, and attachment of the gear boxes and wheels. We would also like to finish early enough to practice on the table and work out any unforeseen issues we may have.