Week 4 - Questions and a New Design

               There were two major actions that I did independently this week.

               The first was sending an email to Ron Swenson for his Milotek contact. I began listing questions since our September 7th meeting’s when we were first shown Milotek’s system, but as Mr. Swenson was leaving for his conference on the 14th, it was time to actually formalize and send it. In addition, when he should us the new support designs, it was important to also ask questions about those too. Fortunately, my questions were comprehensive enough that they could apply to both systems.

               The second was making a rough design of a support system in SOLIDWORKS. I made a 1.525m by 10m "sidewalk" as a guide, then started to design. The features I wanted to incorporate were cylindrical (concrete or thicker metal to protect from car crashes) pedestal and metal support beams to make an “arch” as well as tower where the can use cables to help distribute the load. Both of these components in my original SOLIDWORKS part had the track pass through the center, but I realized that the size needed for the tower/arch would likely be too big to place on a side walk, so I had to scrap it. I then revised my design so that the tower and arch were in “T” shapes (which also has the benefit of allowing two cars going in opposite directions to pass through), but I did not have enough time to polish it (i.e. I didn’t get to show the thicker bases or place cables). Nonetheless, I put a picture of my design below.