Week 4: Assembly and Testing

This week we have the daunting task of completing our assembly and making our robot function. This is our assignment for MS9. So far two very long days have been spent in the machine shop working on assembly of our machine. Our robot is nearly completely assembled except for a few finishing touches. Our team was very surprised at how long everything took to do. At the start of this week we thought we were ahead. We didn't judge very well how long each task would take or calculate additional time needed for the unexpected problems which evidently are part of every step of the process for us. We thought the most time consuming task was already complete (machining all the parts of our robot). However, to our surprise, the assembly time has exceeded expectations and may take even longer than machining the parts did. Finishing touches of assembly and testing are next. We are looking forward to seeing our robot move!

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Yesterday and today we mainly focused on assembly, but we did have to machine the last few pieces of our robot. What was left to machine was drilling a few holes in the sheet metal and also reaming the holes in the axel brackets and press fitting the bushing into the bracket. We faced some struggles with the axel brackets like the axels not fitting through the bushing once the bushings had  been press fitted. To solve this problem we had to ream the bushings so the axels could fit through the holes. We also had to use a special press fit when fitting the ball bearings for the back wheels.
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Besides from machining, our main task for this week was assembly. During the assembly you realize several different problems you weren't expecting to encounter and it really forces you to use your problem solving skills just to find a solution. When we started assembling it seemed like a third of the holes didn't line up with the brackets. Instead of unassembling everything we decided to use a power drill to just make the holes a little bigger allowing the fastener to fit through the holes.  We also ran into the problem that some of the brackets would run into each other, so the solution we came up with was using the grinder to file down the edges that were hitting one another. The only other main problem we had to face was hooking up the axels to the double gearbox and making sure our machine could move.