David-Bunker-SpartanSuperway

This week was mainly waiting to get our materials for building. On Monday all our hardware arrived for bolting the legs on to the track and screwing the wooden track modifications onto the metal components. Master Metal also notified us on Monday that the metal components were cut and drilled to spec, but due to their busy schedule they would be unlikely to get it welded up in time for us. Because of this we decided to pick up the parts on Wednesday morning and I will be welding them together on Thursday. We are also planning to pick up the lumber we need for construction on Thursday, and I will be spending most of Thursday, Friday, Monday and Tuesday working to build our finished product.

After reaching out to Master Metal last week, they responded the following day with the very generous offer to donate the job to us with a completion time around the end of this week. We are hopeful this estimated time line is close as we might have just enough time to do the final assembly. We ordered our bolts and screws from Bolt Depot to reduce costs which should arrive early next week. Tomorrow, 4/25, we plan to gather the rest of the usable wood from the engineering courtyard and purchase the rest of the wood that we will need to finish our build.

This week was largely focused on figuring out manufacturing of our design. With the help of the rest of the teams last week, we were able to finish moving the track to the new location which will enable us to finally begin constructing our designs, though we are very short on time due to how long it took to get it moved over. After reaching out to about 10 different suppliers it became obvious that it would be impossible to find any shop locally that would be able to bend our third rail they way that it was designed so Evelia tackled a quick redesign that utilizes a just a circular pipe instead which Brandon and Nik on the Bogie Team said would be able to work still. Once Evelia finished the new third rail model, I compiled the drawings for all the metal components that we need and converted the models to .step files. These were sent out to Master Metal and Nor-Cal Metal Fabricators to get quotes and estimated turn around times for the work. As long as we can get a turn around time o...

The past 2 weeks have meet with some progress on our project. Evelia tried to rally enough people on the Monday of spring break to get the track components moved over to the new location, but was unsuccessful due to it being break. How ever we were able to get enough people to move the junctino portion of the track this Monday, and were able to successfully move the rest of the track during our meeting time today with the help of the rest of the Superway Teams. While Evelia tackled getting the track moved I took the time to contacted all of manufacturers from the list to see if any of them would be able to fabricate out third rail design. Sadly none of the manufacturers in the area that I was able to find are able to bend 2" steel tubing around the corners. This hinders our plans and gives us two options that I can think of. Widen our range of where we get the third rail manufactured. This might allow us to find some more industrial fabricators capable of this, but will drast...

This week we were able to give our presentation, which is posted on the team blog from week 7. We were also unable to begin moving the track due to the weather but hope to get enough people together during or immediately after break to get it moved. I have begun reaching out to local metal shops to see if anyone is able to fabricate our third rail design locally. The shops I am contacting are listed below. Master Metal Accurate Tube Bending Alan Steel and Supply Sims Metal Vander-Bend We has also had one major setback to our project this week. I was in a bicycle accident and broke my clavicle so I will basically be unable to do any most of the the fabrication we need to get done. This is going to place a heavier work load on Evelia and any other full scale teams that can help out, or require us to spend more money to get all of the metal sections fabricated by a shop.  

This week I researched what metal suppliers are in the area that we could buy our metal from and hopefully bend our third rail design. We will be reaching out to these companies in the next few days to see which ones are capable of bending the tubing we will be using for the third rail as well as the turn around time for such a order. Below is the list of suppliers that we will be reaching out to. Alan Steel & Supply Master Steel Vander-Bend Sims Metal Management Steel Werx JP Metal Fabrication