2017/05/10 - The finished model and the following presentation

Please note that this blog post covers up to the day of presentation (May 12) as the two tasks were worked throughout the whole week.

The first task this week was finishing the model - which unfortunately had some unforeseen challenges. I realized on Sunday that while putting the components together, I had made a few errors in one of my laser cutter patterns - specifically, there were some missing holes in four parts and four less small parts than I needed. On Monday, we fixed the four parts with the missing holes: my dad and I simply used some of the other parts with the correct hole position as reference, and drilled the holes in the manner shown in the image below, and the results worked perfectly. We also made many wooden spacers for the upper part of the guideways, which needed to clear the support beam while looking relatively flush with the upper parts of the side brackets.

Likewise, the flanges that a teammate passed to me were unfortunately not the right type - having a threading where the PVC was supposed to go, and the holes for screws being far too big. For the first part, the solution was to purchase some adapters (two for me and one for my groupmate), which had the added advantage of allowing fine tuning for the pvc pipes height. For the second problem we simply drilled small holes into the thick areas off the flange, and by using a guideway as a spacing reference, attached them to a large wood board.

For the four missing pieces, I brought back the corresponding acrylic sheet on Monday and asked Mr. Meininger if he could make them, and he said yes. I obtained them on Wednesday, and brought them home and with them managed to put the finishing touches on the model, allowing me to bring it for the Friday presentation. I am very happy with the way the final assembly turned out, which is shown below (note the 12th scale bogie in a guideway):

The second task was working on the presentation. Starting on Wednesday morning, my group and I met together and collaborated on the google presentation. My main focus was on finding images of the different prototypes, SOLIDWORKS assemblies and elements of documents from our contact. to explain what we had learned and build through the year. I also made major contributions to improve and fill out the bill of materials, adding my purchases and significantly cleaned up its format. Lastly, I did some general format checking, and some small slide rearrangements to improve logical flow.