Week 3: Water Jet and Machine Shop

Today our team split up into two groups to make sure we completed as many tasks as possible in two hours since our deadline is getting closer. Our goals for today were to water jet our robots body, mill our remaining pieces, and drill press clearance holes in the sheet metal. Thursday we hope to start assembling our robot and figure out the placement of the axles and double gearbox. We hope to finish assembling by the end of the week.

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In the machine shop, we had several tasks we needed to get done today. Our main focus though was our MCM. What we had left to complete for our MCM was milling the L-brackets that will hit the balls off the perches, milling the ramp to guide the balls down to the bed of our robot, and band saw the pin for the spring loaded arm. After we finished our MCM parts we focused on getting the rest of the manufacturing complete, so we could start assembling Thursday. The manufacturing left was drill pressing clearance holes in the sheet metal pieces, finish milling and drilling holes in the brackets, and cutting the axles with the band saw. We did a good job today in the machine shop, because we finished the tasks needed in order to start assembling.

We also traded in the spring we had for a spring attached to a guiding pin.  This spring is ideal for us because it can compress more than a regular spring and meets our spring constant needs as well as the extension length we need. We also got the bushings we needed to press fit our axles into our wheels.  The next time we are in the machine shop we will be able to start assembling our driving unit.
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In the Michigan Solar Car machine shop we used the water jet cutter to finish cutting some tricky pieces needed for our body. Before going to the shop today we had to convert our Solidworks files to dxf files. Then when we arrived in the shop we had to upload our files and create a traversing path for the cutter to follow. We ran into some difficulties with the traversing path however. Our main problem was with our right side piece, because our design was curved and some shapes were to skinny. Since the design was curved we had to reconnect all the broken lines so that it would recognized we wanted to cut material out. We then had to make our shapes fatter so the tool size was able

to cut, because our shapes were skinnier then the tool size, the tool couldn't fit in the small shapes and cut the piece accurately. We solved this problem by editing our Solidworks files and making the shapes thicker. By doing this, we fixed our traversing problem and our piece was then able to be cut. Once we got our files all ready for the water jet we were able to cut all our pieces. The benefits of using the water jet were being able to cut out all our pieces with the holes already placed. This saved us a lot of time, since we could use one machine instead of three (band saw, mill, and drill press).