Build-a-Bird Final Thoughts

We fixed up the crank on gearbird to be tight-fit, thereby officially completing our build-a-bird project!  It was very easy to fix the crank, and we used no extra Delrin.  I drilled two new holes in the same circular scrap piece of Delrin, but this time used the drill press shaving method we had previously used on both of our gears.  This meant that, instead of using the 1/4 inch drill bit, we used the drill bit that was one size smaller, and then carefully shaved a little more Delrin away until the crank was tight fit.  This improved crank eliminated the one problem that our gearbird had been having--that the crank could only be turned in one direction.  The new crank can successfully be turned in both directions, giving gearbird a lot more freedom of motion!
Overall, I am very pleased with our final result for this project.  We had to go through a few iterations for some pieces (happily, mainly the smaller pieces), but in the end everything fit together very well and functioned as intended.  If I were to build our bird again, I would have liked to end up with the same final product, but I definitely feel that some of the iterations we went though could have been eliminated (i.e. some Delrin could have been saved).  I feel that the majority of our iterations were necessary and helped us figure out how to make our bird better, but some--such as printing out various small pieces using the wrong thickness of Delrin--could have easily been eliminated by checking our calculations more carefully.  We ended up switching our base from 1/2 to 1/4 inch Delrin, and I am glad we did.  Its only purpose was to support our gearbird, and the 1/4 inch Delrin gave the correct amount of support--more would have been unnecessary. I definitely feel like I learned a lot about SolidWorks over the course of this project, and feel a lot more comfortable using it now than I did a few weeks ago!