Week 5

This week work was done towards sorting through the design files from last year.  It appears that the team from last year already broke down the truss assembly provided by Futran into separate components so that they could get a quote from Vander-Bend last year. This was something I was going to tackle this coming week but may no longer need too.  However, an assembly of the parts was not put together from what I can tell, so that is one thing I will cover in the next couple of days.  The files were also spread out over four separate folders so the need to be organized into a better file system.

I took the time to look through the itemized quote they received as well, and the ~$12000 looks like it covered almost all the components necessary to built it with one major caveat, it did not include the tracks itself.   The quote also did not include all the hardware required to assemble the entire guideway structure, which will likely run up to a few hundred dollars due to the quantity, size, and grade of nuts, bolts, and washers necessary for assembly.

Today we also took the truss assembly file to get all the relevant dimensions for the other teams and so we could finalize the numbers for our coming designs, they have been posted on our team blog. To make manufacturing of our track feasible at the small scale we are working at, we are likely going to simplify the running track design down to some connected rectangular steel tube, instead of the interlocking Futran design. We do not have a cost comparison between the two, it may end up similar, but unless Futran has a curved version of their interlocking design that they are willing to share with us, we may not be able to come up with a compatible design that would be manufacturable at our extremely small scale.  The rectangular tubing would be easy to have bent at a large enough supplier that it will likely come out as a much cheaper system for this prototyping while the Futran design may be better for full scale production.

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