Week 3: Finishing Parts & Assembly

This week we have been very busy trying to get everything ready for MS9. We spent everyday in the machine shop trying to finish up all our parts and start assembling. Earlier in the week we used the water jet to finish making the side pieces of our robot and worked hard to finish the arm of our robot. Later in the week we focused on our driving unit and started to make sure everything was able to be assembled. Our goals for the upcoming week is to have our machine fully assembled by the due date for MS9 and hopefully have everything fully functioning so we can start practicing. We hope to assemble fast, because we know there will always be an unforeseen obstacles and we want to leave room for that.
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This week was our first time using the lathe and we had several tasks we needed to complete on it. We had to use the lathe for cutting our axels for our rear wheel drive, cut the pin that for our spring loaded arm, bore holes in some of the axels and pin, and also face off all the axels. Using the lathe was new to us, but we didn't have any major challenges while doing it. We were able to get everything done we needed to except drilling the hole in the pin, because we need to ask Bob or Mark for advice how to approach doing that, because it seems pretty tricky especially with the pin being so small.
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Besides for using the lathe, we also used the mill, drill press, sheet cutter, press fitter, and sheet bender. We were focusing on getting the final parts machined, so we could assemble our robot. What we still had left to make were the brackets for the axels, extra brackets to hold sides together, drilling holes in some of our side pieces, and press fitting our bearings into the wheels and axels. We got everything done except for 2 brackets, needed for the axels, and drilling the holes in 6 of the brackets. We should easily be able to drill the holes in the brackets because we have already made a lot and are well experienced with the machine the only problem we may run into is that we have to ream the holes for the axel brackets and we haven't used the reamer yet, however we are confident we can figure it out.  Some challenges we faced this week occurred during  assembly. We found out a lot of our brackets didn't line up with holes, so we had to cut the holes in our sheet metal larger to account for the misalignment of holes. Once we corrected some of these minor mishaps we were able to get our robot 50% assembled. All in all, we had a good week and are hoping to finish our robot by next wednesday except for some minor details.