We started off the day by printing out the first iteration of our large rectangles.
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| Hmmm.... |
As you can see, there were two rather unfortunate problems with this iteration. . .
1. We had forgotten to readjust the protrusions on the bottom of the rectangles to fit our thinner base (apparently a recurring problem with us).
2. We somehow printed our large rectangles with no holes for the Delrin rods. We are not exactly sure how this occurred, since we had definitely measured the distance between the holes in our gears and all three of us remember adding the holes to our SolidWorks part, but perhaps we had somehow not turned the lines marking the holes red during the printing stage? It remained something of a mystery, but we once again made corrections on our SolidWorks part, in hopes that the next iteration would be our last.
Next, we printed out another iteration of our small-holed gears. We used the drill press shaving method we had developed during the last class, and at the end of this delicate process we ended up with two press fit gears, hooray!
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| Our improvised clamp extension! |
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| Gear Baton! |
In fact, their fit was so tight that we had to use the press for leverage to fully connect the Delrin rods to the gears!
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| Two gear flowers--very rare! |
At the end of class today, after printing out what we had hoped would be our final iteration, we realized two things:
1. (Less Important) The holes in the big rectangles were slightly too close together, as you can see in the photo below.
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| A little too close for comfort |
We would have simply corrected this by using out drill press shaving method to slightly enlarge the holes, but . . .
2. (Very Important) When we finally connected the gears and big rectangles to our base, we made the very unfortunate realization that the gears were too big! The gear plug-in had not allowed us to pick the exact diameter of our gear, instead we adjusted it indirectly by way of the number of teeth and the diametral pitch. This process had resulted in gears that were slightly bigger than we had originally planned them to be, and the difference substantial enough that they would not be able to turn.
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| Oh dear . . . (or rather, oh GEAR) |
We decided to fix this by increasing the heights of both the small and large rectangles. Since it was inevitable that we would need to print out one more iteration of the rectangles, we decided to go big and double their heights instead of raising them just enough for the gears to clear the base. Doing so would gave the wings a lot more flapping room--we wouldn't have wanted to cramp our avian friend's style!
We quickly fixed up the dimensions of our big and small rectangles on SolidWorks, and ended the day knowing that though we had a lot of assembly work left to do, we were finally (hopefully) ready for our final iteration!
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| Tall big rectangle |
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| Tall little rectangle |
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